First Impressions: MSI 11th Gen Laptop with Tiger Lake Processor and Xe Graphics

The wait is finally over, and we're excited to get our hands on the new MSI 11th gen laptop with the latest Tiger Lake processor and Xe graphics. As we've been told, this laptop comes in two modes - best battery mode at 15 watts, which gives us a more realistic comparison with other 15-inch laptops, or its best performance boost mode at 28 watts. In our tests, we started with the 11th gen MSI laptop in best battery mode and ran a few quick tests to compare it with other laptops.

The first laptop we brought into the comparison was the Dell XPS 13, which features the current 10th gen chip that this new laptop will replace along with the fastest Iris Plus graphics. Next up was the Acer Swift 3, which has the same processor as the Dell but comes with much faster NVIDIA MX350 graphics. Finally, we brought in some AMD competition with the Ryzen 7 4800U and Vega 8 graphics, although it's worth noting that this is a 25-watt CPU. When we switched the MSI 11th gen laptop to its best performance boost mode, we saw that the 8-core Ryzen 7 still beats out the 4-core 11th gen chips in CPU-based tests like Geekbench and Sidebench.

However, in time-spy and PC Mark, which take advantage of graphics, we saw a decent boost over the Ryzen testing. But in games, things have been a bit trickier, with some crashing issues reported. It's worth taking these results with a pinch of salt, as there are many variables at play, including the laptop's cooling system and the new faster RAM. The MSI laptops' cooling system is pretty decent, and the new graphics are indeed faster than the old Iris Plus.

It's also good to see that when we pulled the plug on the laptop, it still delivered almost full performance, with only a 4% drop in time-spy results compared to when it was plugged in. While we can't wait to get our hands on a proper retail laptop and test more games, video editing, and of course battery life, which is pretty important for these portable laptops.

First impressions are that Tiger Lake is shaking things up to be a big upgrade over current Ice Lake laptops. It would have been nice to see six or maybe eight-core options for the new chips, as AMD has still come out on top in multi-core tests. But the real winner seems to be the Xe graphics and Intel's claims of double the performance over last year's Iris Plus seem pretty bang on.

It's also worth noting that Intel's driver support for games hasn't always been the best, especially when compared to NVIDIA's chips. However, Intel tells us that they're putting a lot more resources into this, with new drivers installed through Windows updates dedicated specifically to each game. This means you won't need to install massive patches and driver updates every month or so, which covers every game even if you're not playing it.

Looking ahead to the future, we can expect these new Tiger Lake laptops to start coming out in October time, with discounts on current 10th gen Ice Lake laptops likely to follow during Black Friday and the holiday season. If graphics performance is really important to you, waiting a little bit might be worth it to get a brand-new 11th gen laptop. But if not, there are still plenty of great laptops out there right now. So, what do you think - will Tiger Lake be enough to tempt you to upgrade your laptop? Let us know in the comments below! And don't forget to hit that little subscribe button down below for more laptop videos, reviews, and buying guides from us here on The Tech Chat.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys i'm tom of techchap and this is a laptop that you well can't actually buy it's a pre-production model of what i think is going to be the new msi prestige 14 although you wouldn't know by looking at it because it's got this big intel logo on the back although the box suggests otherwise as does the fact that i reviewed this last year and it looks almost identical but that's not important what's important is what's on the inside and maybe being spoiled by the wallpaper here because this is running on a brand new intel 11th gen tiger lake processor the i7 1185 g7 to be exact which is a 4 core 8 thread 28 watt chip so these next gen chips will be powering most new laptops particularly thin and light ones like this and i think we can all agree this needs to be good because amd have been killing it this year with their ryzen 4000 series and every laptop review i make from the del xps to the huawei matebook there's always comments saying i wish it had an amd ryzen chip instead plus with apple silicon around the corner competition is heating up firstly this is not a full review because well this is not a final laptop non-final hardware and software and as you can see there's still one or two bugs to be ironed out i also can't really test battery life nor am i allowed to take off the bottom to show you the internals so this is kind of just like a glimpse of what we might be able to expect with these new chips and why maybe if you're thinking about buying a new laptop it may be worth just holding out a little bit longer now to give you some context along with the new i7 processor in this laptop we're getting 16 gigs of all new faster ddr4x 4266 megahertz ram as well as a one terabyte pcie 3 ssd wi-fi 6 we've got a couple of new thunderbolt 4 ports here and it's a 14 inch 1080p touchscreen you can also see as i open it the keyboard lifts up to give us better airflow and cooling which is why they've gone with the more powerful 28 watt version of the i7 so faster and more efficient cpus faster ram a few other extras we'll talk about in a second but for me the headline is this guy intel's new xe graphics which they tell me should give us up to double the performance of current ice lake integrated chips and it should compete with nvidia's mx350 dedicated chip which is pretty impressive so whether you're photo and video editing or gaming this should make a big difference we also get extras like thunderbolt 4 which is the new highest standard of usb4 faster wi-fi 6 gig plus and also pcie 4 support so we're the 11th gen tiger lake we'll be getting the usual range of i3 i5 and i7 chips in laptops most thin and light laptops will get 15 watt chips but some with beefier cooling like this one will get the full fat 28 watt model now the problem is i actually don't have a laptop with me that has last year's equivalent processor uh the 25 watt version of ice lake there were very very few laptops that actually offered it uh the main one would be the razer blade 13 but particularly the mercury white edition which i didn't manage to get my hands on but what i can do is by adjusting the windows power mode here best battery life limits the chips power to 15 watts better performance gives you a 28 watt power limit and best performance is 28 watts with dynamic tuning so if you have a particularly good cooling system in a laptop and it has the power headroom to do it it can boost all the way up to 36 watts now i have only had a couple of days with this laptop and actually as i'm filming this it's been collected in about two hours so i haven't got an awful lot of time but i managed to run a few quick tests and if we start with the 11th gen msi laptop in best battery mode so 15 watts this gives us as i say a more realistic comparison between other 15 more isolate laptops so if we bring in the dell xps 13 first with the current 10th gen chip that this new one will replace along with the current fastest iris plus graphics then we have the acer swift 3 which has the same processor as the dell but the much faster nvidia mx350 graphics chip and finally let's bring in a bit of amd competition with the ryzen 7 4800u and vega 8 graphics although bear in mind this is a 25 watt cpu so now let's switch the msi 11th gen laptop to its 28 watt best performance boost mode and you can see the 8 core ryzen 7 still beats out the 4 core 11th gen chips in cpu based tests like geekbench and sidebench but in time spy and pc mark which take advantage of the graphics we're seeing a decent boost over the ryzen testing games has been a little bit trickier though with some crashing issues so it's worth taking these results with a pinch of salt plus we have the msi laptops pretty decent cooling system and also the new faster ram so there are some of the variables as well but with that said in these tests the 11th gen chip with xc graphics came out on top in every test bar fortnite where the mx350 still takes the lead although i think a big part of that is down to driver support the vega 8 graphics were pretty impressive as well but still a little bit behind the mx350 it's also good to see that when you pull the plug as it were that we're still getting almost full performance from this when it's running on battery so you can see in time spy the performance is only four percent slower on battery versus when it's plugged in so while i can't wait to get my hands on a proper retail laptop and test more games video editing and of course battery life which is pretty important for these portable laptops first impressions tiger lake is shaking up to be a big upgrade even over current ice lake laptops it would have been nice to see six or maybe eight core options for the new chips as amd are still coming out on top in multi-core tests but the real winner seems to be the xe graphics and intel's claims of double the performance over last year's iris plus seems to be pretty bang on i am curious how this will perform versus nvidia's brand new mx450 chip and also those questions over driver support because in the past intel with games hasn't always been the best not the most well optimized and that's partly why nvidia's chips while also being more powerful have performed much better in games specifically because the drivers have been a lot more optimized intel tell me that they are putting a lot more resources into this and actually what will happen is when you install a new game it'll detect it and then you'll get a new intel driver through your usual windows updates which will be actually dedicated for that one game so unlike with nvidia or amd graphics cards um you wouldn't actually need to install these big massive patches driver updates every month or so which covers every game even if you're not playing it you'll just get the ones bespoke to what you're playing on your laptop which sounds pretty smart actually and i'm also looking forward to seeing laptops with pcie 4 storage and to see usb 4 and thunderbolt 4 become more commonplace so these new tag late laptops will be coming out pretty soon uh sort of end of 2020 is the ballpark range but i suspect we'll start seeing models uh from october time so depending on how quickly you need a new laptop if you can wait a little bit maybe a few weeks maybe a month or so then we will start to see these new 11th gen tiger late laptops come out and combine with you know black friday and the holiday season and perhaps even discounts on current uh 10th gen ice lake laptops as these ones start to replace them either way whether you're looking to get a brand new 11th gen or a discounted old one i think it could be worth waiting uh to buy a new laptop if you can particularly if graphics performance is really important to you if not then there's still loads of great laptops out there right now so what do you reckon do you think tiger lake will be enough to tempt you to upgrade your laptop let me know in the comments below and if you do want to see more laptop videos from me reviews buying guides then make sure you do hit that little subscribe button down below so you don't miss out and i'll see you guys next time right here on the tech chat youhey guys i'm tom of techchap and this is a laptop that you well can't actually buy it's a pre-production model of what i think is going to be the new msi prestige 14 although you wouldn't know by looking at it because it's got this big intel logo on the back although the box suggests otherwise as does the fact that i reviewed this last year and it looks almost identical but that's not important what's important is what's on the inside and maybe being spoiled by the wallpaper here because this is running on a brand new intel 11th gen tiger lake processor the i7 1185 g7 to be exact which is a 4 core 8 thread 28 watt chip so these next gen chips will be powering most new laptops particularly thin and light ones like this and i think we can all agree this needs to be good because amd have been killing it this year with their ryzen 4000 series and every laptop review i make from the del xps to the huawei matebook there's always comments saying i wish it had an amd ryzen chip instead plus with apple silicon around the corner competition is heating up firstly this is not a full review because well this is not a final laptop non-final hardware and software and as you can see there's still one or two bugs to be ironed out i also can't really test battery life nor am i allowed to take off the bottom to show you the internals so this is kind of just like a glimpse of what we might be able to expect with these new chips and why maybe if you're thinking about buying a new laptop it may be worth just holding out a little bit longer now to give you some context along with the new i7 processor in this laptop we're getting 16 gigs of all new faster ddr4x 4266 megahertz ram as well as a one terabyte pcie 3 ssd wi-fi 6 we've got a couple of new thunderbolt 4 ports here and it's a 14 inch 1080p touchscreen you can also see as i open it the keyboard lifts up to give us better airflow and cooling which is why they've gone with the more powerful 28 watt version of the i7 so faster and more efficient cpus faster ram a few other extras we'll talk about in a second but for me the headline is this guy intel's new xe graphics which they tell me should give us up to double the performance of current ice lake integrated chips and it should compete with nvidia's mx350 dedicated chip which is pretty impressive so whether you're photo and video editing or gaming this should make a big difference we also get extras like thunderbolt 4 which is the new highest standard of usb4 faster wi-fi 6 gig plus and also pcie 4 support so we're the 11th gen tiger lake we'll be getting the usual range of i3 i5 and i7 chips in laptops most thin and light laptops will get 15 watt chips but some with beefier cooling like this one will get the full fat 28 watt model now the problem is i actually don't have a laptop with me that has last year's equivalent processor uh the 25 watt version of ice lake there were very very few laptops that actually offered it uh the main one would be the razer blade 13 but particularly the mercury white edition which i didn't manage to get my hands on but what i can do is by adjusting the windows power mode here best battery life limits the chips power to 15 watts better performance gives you a 28 watt power limit and best performance is 28 watts with dynamic tuning so if you have a particularly good cooling system in a laptop and it has the power headroom to do it it can boost all the way up to 36 watts now i have only had a couple of days with this laptop and actually as i'm filming this it's been collected in about two hours so i haven't got an awful lot of time but i managed to run a few quick tests and if we start with the 11th gen msi laptop in best battery mode so 15 watts this gives us as i say a more realistic comparison between other 15 more isolate laptops so if we bring in the dell xps 13 first with the current 10th gen chip that this new one will replace along with the current fastest iris plus graphics then we have the acer swift 3 which has the same processor as the dell but the much faster nvidia mx350 graphics chip and finally let's bring in a bit of amd competition with the ryzen 7 4800u and vega 8 graphics although bear in mind this is a 25 watt cpu so now let's switch the msi 11th gen laptop to its 28 watt best performance boost mode and you can see the 8 core ryzen 7 still beats out the 4 core 11th gen chips in cpu based tests like geekbench and sidebench but in time spy and pc mark which take advantage of the graphics we're seeing a decent boost over the ryzen testing games has been a little bit trickier though with some crashing issues so it's worth taking these results with a pinch of salt plus we have the msi laptops pretty decent cooling system and also the new faster ram so there are some of the variables as well but with that said in these tests the 11th gen chip with xc graphics came out on top in every test bar fortnite where the mx350 still takes the lead although i think a big part of that is down to driver support the vega 8 graphics were pretty impressive as well but still a little bit behind the mx350 it's also good to see that when you pull the plug as it were that we're still getting almost full performance from this when it's running on battery so you can see in time spy the performance is only four percent slower on battery versus when it's plugged in so while i can't wait to get my hands on a proper retail laptop and test more games video editing and of course battery life which is pretty important for these portable laptops first impressions tiger lake is shaking up to be a big upgrade even over current ice lake laptops it would have been nice to see six or maybe eight core options for the new chips as amd are still coming out on top in multi-core tests but the real winner seems to be the xe graphics and intel's claims of double the performance over last year's iris plus seems to be pretty bang on i am curious how this will perform versus nvidia's brand new mx450 chip and also those questions over driver support because in the past intel with games hasn't always been the best not the most well optimized and that's partly why nvidia's chips while also being more powerful have performed much better in games specifically because the drivers have been a lot more optimized intel tell me that they are putting a lot more resources into this and actually what will happen is when you install a new game it'll detect it and then you'll get a new intel driver through your usual windows updates which will be actually dedicated for that one game so unlike with nvidia or amd graphics cards um you wouldn't actually need to install these big massive patches driver updates every month or so which covers every game even if you're not playing it you'll just get the ones bespoke to what you're playing on your laptop which sounds pretty smart actually and i'm also looking forward to seeing laptops with pcie 4 storage and to see usb 4 and thunderbolt 4 become more commonplace so these new tag late laptops will be coming out pretty soon uh sort of end of 2020 is the ballpark range but i suspect we'll start seeing models uh from october time so depending on how quickly you need a new laptop if you can wait a little bit maybe a few weeks maybe a month or so then we will start to see these new 11th gen tiger late laptops come out and combine with you know black friday and the holiday season and perhaps even discounts on current uh 10th gen ice lake laptops as these ones start to replace them either way whether you're looking to get a brand new 11th gen or a discounted old one i think it could be worth waiting uh to buy a new laptop if you can particularly if graphics performance is really important to you if not then there's still loads of great laptops out there right now so what do you reckon do you think tiger lake will be enough to tempt you to upgrade your laptop let me know in the comments below and if you do want to see more laptop videos from me reviews buying guides then make sure you do hit that little subscribe button down below so you don't miss out and i'll see you guys next time right here on the tech chat you\n"