MSI’s Panther Lake Laptop Delivers on Intel’s Promise of Power Plus Efficiency

8 / 10

Score

Cnet Score

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MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus

$1,300 at MSI

Pros

• Playable framerates from integrated Intel Arc B390 graphics
• Around-the-clock battery life
• Thin and light and quiet
• MSI’s new Prestige design is huge improvement

Cons

• Display is only 60Hz
• Bottom panel gets hot during games
• Diving-board effect with mechanical touchpad

The MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus is the first laptop I’ve tested with an Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processor. At the heart of this 14-inch two-in-one is a Core Ultra X7 358H processor from Intel’s Panther Lake series. Intel has touted the new chips for their application and AI performance, while also providing longer battery life. But most notably, the integrated Arc B390 graphics processor delivers gaming and content-creation performance typically unheard of from an iGPU. With Panther Lake, the biggest question is this: Have we finally arrived at the promised land where an iGPU has enough 3D muscle to allow a typical thin-and-light laptop with a long-running battery life to also be a gaming laptop?

As impressive as its performance is on the whole, I wouldn’t classify the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus as a gaming laptop. Calling it an ultraportable laptop with some gaming capabilities is a more accurate description. It offers playable framerates in AAA titles, even if you’ll need to employ Intel’s Xe Super Sampling Frame Generation in some instances for smooth gameplay. And the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus operates in near silence while offering all-day battery life, two items that are never part of a true gaming laptop’s list of capabilities.

To help launch Intel’s new processor, MSI introduces a new design for its Prestige series, and it’s a big improvement over past efforts. New Intel internals and a completely redesigned look from MSI — let’s jump in.

Panther Lake particulars

Let’s start on the inside. Manufactured on Intel’s new 18A (2-nanometer) manufacturing process, the Core Ultra X7 358H is a 16-core processor with six performance cores, eight efficient cores and two low-power efficient cores. This is the same core arrangement as previous Arrow Lake chips, but the 2nm process is a die shrink from Intel’s former 3nm process to improve power efficiency. Panther Lake also introduces two new architecture features: RibbonFET transistors and PowerVia backside power delivery, which further increase power efficiency and thermal management. Intel is the first to move to a 2nm process; Apple’s M5 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 series chips are 3nm, and AMD’s Zen 5 is 4nm.

Like the previous Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips, the Core Ultra X7 358H is unthreaded, so the number of processing threads is the same as the number of physical cores. And the 16 cores are no greater than what you could get in previous Intel chips. Where the cores have increased is with the GPU. The «X» in the Core Ultra X7 denotes the presence of Intel’s new top-of-the-line integrated GPU, Arc B390, which features 12 Xe3 graphics cores, up from a maximum of eight Xe2 cores in Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake. The new Xe3 graphics cores also promise greater power and efficiency than the Xe2 generation.

AI performance gets a boost, too, and it comes mostly from the GPU. Panther Lake’s neural processing unit gets only a modest bump to 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS) from Lunar Lake’s 47 TOPS, but the Arc B390 graphics is capable of 122 TOPS, up from 64 TOPS with Lunar Lake’s Arc 140V GPU and 74 TOPS from Arrow Lake’s Arc 140T GPU.

MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus performance

The Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus pairs the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H with 32GB of 8,533MHz DDR5 memory and turned in strong performance and long battery life in testing. Its multi- and single-core results on Geekbench 6 were outstanding, trailing only those of Apple’s latest M5 MacBook Pro and the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Aura Edition, which features the Core Ultra 9 285H from Intel’s Arrow Lake series. It also finished behind these two laptops and gaming laptops with RTX 4050 or 5050 graphics on the multi- and single-core tests for Cinebench 2024, but ahead of previous-gen Intel laptops and those with Qualcomm Snapdragon X series chips.

You might think of these results as middling, but this level of CPU performance looks better when you consider the efficiency you also get with the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus and the battery life it provides. Calling it «all-day battery» life undersells it. It ran for more than 25 hours on our YouTube streaming battery drain test, which puts this x86-based laptop on the same level as models with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X series processors and Apple’s Arm-based M series chips. The Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus lasted more than 2 hours longer than the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro in battery testing.

With gaming, the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus became the first laptop with integrated graphics I’ve tested to hit 60 frames per second on the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark. It averaged 64 frames per second on the test at 1080p with quality settings at Highest. That can’t match the framerates of RTX 4050 and 5050 laptops, but it’s certainly playable without needing to sacrifice quality settings (30fps is the bare minimum we look for, but you want 60fps for smooth gameplay). It was a few frames per second faster than the M5 MacBook Pro and more than double the 31fps that the Dell 14 Premium with Arrow Lake’s Arc 140T GPU averaged on the test.

On Guardians of the Galaxy, the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus averaged 53fps at 1080p and High settings. That falls just shy of the 60fps threshold for smooth gameplay, but is nearly twice that of the 30fps of the Arrow Lake Dell 14 Premium. And when I dropped the quality setting to Medium, the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus averaged 61fps at 1080p.

On a more demanding AAA title like Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus averaged only 27fps at 1080p and High settings. I was able to increase it to 47fps when XeSS Frame Generation but needed to drop the quality settings to Low with XeSS FG enabled to achieve a more playable and stutter-free 65 fps at 1080p.

In summary, the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus offers strong application performance and capable 3D gaming performance combined with the ability to literally run around the clock (and then some) on a single charge (though, to be clear, not while gaming). This combination was unheard of in a laptop before Panther Lake.

And even when running games, the laptop remained whisper-quiet. Only when I lowered my ear to a few inches above the keyboard could I hear the cooling fans spinning. The back half of the bottom panel certainly got hot during longer gaming sessions, but performance remained steady. You just won’t want to play games with the laptop resting on your lap without using a cooling pad.

Prestigious new looks

The Panther Lake processor isn’t the only new feature of the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus. It also introduces a complete redesign for MSI’s Prestige line, and it’s a big improvement. Prestige laptops have always been impressively thin and light, but the overall look was lacking. There was little to distinguish their design from a generic OEM chassis. With the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus, there’s a design ID, starting with a new MSI logo on the lid.

The edges have been smoothed out, creating gently rounded corners and edges that remind me of Lenovo’s flagship Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition. The aluminum enclosure is very thin but feels rigid to give the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus a premium feel to go with its premium looks. It’s only half an inch thick and weighs just a hair over 3 pounds.

On the underside is a slot to stow the included MSI Nano Pen. It fits in between the two rubber feet on the front edge of the bottom panel. It’s a clever way to house the pen on such a thin laptop where there isn’t room to garage it inside the chassis, but the pen is very narrow and is better for jotting down a quick note than any serious creative pursuits.

The display is a low-resolution OLED that’s becoming more popular to provide an OLED’s unbeatable contrast ratio with near-perfect black levels without a higher resolution, which will shorten the battery life (while also adding to the overall cost). The 14-inch OLED display features a pedestrian 1,920×1,200-pixel resolution and standard 60Hz refresh rate. The pixel count suffices for the size; text and images are sharp enough. Given the gaming capabilities of the Arc B390 graphics, however, I’m surprised MSI didn’t outfit the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus with at least a 90Hz panel to give more overhead for matching 3D frame rates to the display’s refresh rate.

The Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus finds room for quad speakers, and they produce audio that’s a bit fuller and more dynamic than that of a typical thin-and-light laptop. The audio sounds better with the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus in tent or presentation mode than in standard laptop mode, where the speakers fire downward into your lap or desk.

Many compact laptops force you to make due with a limited number of ports, but the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus upends this trend. It serves up two Thunderbolt 4 ports as well as a pair of USB-A ports and an HDMI connection, so you can leave any adapters at home. You’ve also got two biometric options for secure logins: a fingerprint reader integrated on the power button and an IR sensor for facial recognition on the 1080p webcam.

I like the firm, shallow-travel keys because their feel is very similar to the keyboard on my work laptop, a MacBook Pro, but gamers will probably want a more plush feel with snappier feedback. The touchpad is roomy but offers a standard mechanical click response and the accompanying diving-board effect, where clicks are much firmer on the top half than the bottom. For $1,300, the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus is priced where a haptic touchpad with a consistent and customizable click response is not out of the question.

Is the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus a good laptop?

It’s thin, light, well-designed and offers unmatched versatility. In addition to its two-in-one flexibility, the performance I saw from the Core Ultra X7 358H processor and integrated Arc B390 graphics proves Intel’s claims of Panther Lake providing «mobility without compromise.» Its mix of power and efficiency is unprecedented. You certainly won’t confuse Arc B390 graphics with an Nvidia RTX GPU, but you’ll be able to achieve playable frame rates in AAA titles on the Prestige 14 Flip AI. And you get this 3D performance in a thin-and-light design with around-the-clock battery life.

The Prestige 14 Flip AI is the first Panther Lake laptop CNET has reviewed, so it’s too early to say how it stacks up with the rest of the field, but it certainly makes a positive impression.