MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ a surprisingly powerful ultraportable held back by a clunky trackpad. It’s a shame, really, because it’s very well designed and thanks to Intel’s Panther Lake CPUit can even run games like Arc Raiders without biting a sweat. It also has more ports than most thin and light machines, its OLED screen is great for productive work and at three pounds it’s easy to carry around all day. But damn its mechanical trackpad – why does it even exist when Apple, Microsoft and others have been able to implement excellent haptic touchpads for years? Come on.

MSI

MSI’s Prestige 14 Flip AI+ is an incredibly powerful ultraportable, thanks to Intel’s Panther Lake chips. But it’s held back by a clunky trackpad and weak keyboard.

Pros

• Excellent CPU performance
• Solid game support
• Bold OLED screen
• Tons of ports
• Relatively cheap

Cons

• Terrible mechanical trackpad
• Soft-feeling keyboard
• The display is limited to 60Hz

Hardware

With its gray case, sad design and rather chunky bezels, the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ doesn’t exactly make a striking impression. From a distance, you can tell that it’s thin, and it’s also clear that MSI has taken advantage of its slim case by pushing two USB-A ports, two USB-C connections, an HDMI port and a headphone jack. It would have been nice to have some sort of SD card slot as well, but at least the Prestige 14 can be connected to older accessories, monitors and TVs without a USB-C hub.

Once you get the hang of it, though, the Prestige 14’s three-pound frame feels pretty incredible. It’s a little heavier than the 2.7-pound MacBook Air, but its screen size directly competes with the 3.4- to 3.6-pound 14-inchMacBook Pro. The “Flip” in its name also means it’s versatile, with the ability to rotate its screen into a tablet mode, or various tent configurations.

What makes the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ really interesting is the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor, which has 16 cores and a maximum speed of 4.8GHz. Specifically, it has four P-cores for fast performance, eight efficient E-cores and four low-power E-cores. The Ultra X7 is also one of the new Panther Lake chips with gobs of graphics power in Intel’s Arc B390 GPU, giving them more gaming chops than previous ultraportable chips. The laptop also has 32GB of RAM, which is the ideal amount for serious productivity work, and a spacious 1TB SSD.

The Prestige 14’s stylus-friendly 14-inch OLED screen helps distract from the mundane design of the case, with typically deep black levels and excellent contrast that I appreciate from OLED, along with bold 100 percent DCI-P3 color. This makes almost everything look great, although I wish MSI offered more than a 60Hz refresh rate – a 90Hz or 120Hz screen would make scrolling web pages smoother.

And speaking of the stylus, that’s hidden under the Prestige 14. I didn’t find it particularly useful for notetaking, but for those who do it’s easy to hide. It’s too thin for long handwriting, and anyone doing serious notetaking or digital art is better off with a larger stylus or dedicated drawing pad.

Uses: A stealth performer

After seeing the relatively slim Lenovo Panther Lake laptop reach 190 fps in Battlefield 6using only Intel’s built-in Arc B390 GPU, I’m excited to see what the new hardware will do in the real world. Simply put, the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ does not disappoint. It scored 10,169 points on PCMark 10, the highest score we’ve seen for a Windows PC.

And yes, that includes several powerful gaming systems like the Alienware 16 Area 51 (8,245 points) and the Razer Blade 18 (7,703), both of which run Intel’s last-gen Core Ultra 9 275HX chip. Of course, those systems have faster GPUs, such as NVIDIA’s RTX 5080, but PCMark 10 is less dependent on graphics performance. The Prestige 14 is close to the M5 MacBook Pro in Geekbench 6’s multi-threaded CPU test, scoring 16,633 points compared to Apple’s 18,003. But the MacBook Pro reigned supreme in an embedded test, scoring 4,310 points compared to the MSI’s 2,864.

When it comes to games, the Prestige 14 reaches a surprisingly high 80-95 fps in Arc Raiders while playing at 1080p with medium graphics settings, as well as AMD’s FSR3 upscaling and 2x frame generation. Without AMD features, Arc Raiders ran at 45-50 fps, which is still respectable for an ultraportable. To my surprise, Intel’s XeSS upscaling technology was not used Arc Raiders during my testing, but there is a good chance that the tool will add more performance. (I’ve asked Intel about the loss of XeSS, and will update when I hear back.)

on cyberpunk 2077, The Prestige 14 hit 35 fps while playing at 1080p with default settings. Flipping Intel’s XeSS frame generation breaks that to 45 fps. If you’re used to 30 fps performance on consoles, those numbers aren’t obvious to play with, but they certainly fall short of the 60 fps PC gamers are usually looking for. It’s best to think of the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ as a laptop where you can play games occasionally, perhaps while you’re away from your gaming desktop. It is by no means a substitute for a dedicated gaming laptop.

For more productivity tasks, like juggling multiple browser tabs and editing large images, the Prestige 14 doesn’t come through. A healthy 32GB of RAM gives it plenty of breathing room for multi-tasking, and unlike other ultraportables, I didn’t notice any serious performance degradation while running on battery. On that note, the Prestige 14 also lasted 22 hours and 15 minutes in PCMark 10’s battery benchmark. That’s the highest number we’ve seen from a laptop, and it’s a good sign of what we can expect from other Panther Lake systems.

While there’s clearly a lot to like about the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+, I’m less impressed with its mechanical trackpad and keyboard. Maybe I’m spoiled by the more responsive haptic trackpads from the competition, but the Prestige 14’s old-school trackpad continues to slow me down with erratic clicks and other annoyances. The laptop’s keyboard is similarly cheap, lacking the depth and comfort I’ve come to expect from other ultraportables in the $1,299 price range. Even after hours of testing, I was able to type on the Prestige 14 at full speed without errors. It’s a shame that MSI is so good, but is hampered by weak components.

Should you buy the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+?

As one of the first Panther Lake laptops on the market, the $1,299 Prestige 14 Flip AI+ is a solid machine, if you’re willing to overlook the touchpad’s flaws. More than anything else, the Prestige 14 makes me excited to see what other PC makers have to offer with Intel’s new chips. It took a while, but now Intel finally has some decent competition against Apple’s M-series hardware. The time to play with ultralight machines is finally here.