MSI Prestige 13 AI+ review: Small, affordable and hard to fault

The Prestige 16 AI+ we reviewed recently was one of the most convincing and appealing laptops to come from MSI in quite some time. A solid, affordable, and well-specified general-purpose machine; the only reason to not buy one would be if you wanted something smaller and lighter.

MSI has now addressed that issue by releasing a 13.3in version, called the Prestige 13 AI+. Built around the same Intel Panther Lake processor as the Prestige 16 AI +, it offers similarly good value for money and can be picked up for between £1,249 and £1,299 depending on where and when you look.

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MSI Prestige 13 AI+: Design

In the world of superlight laptops, weight is everything. Or rather, the absence of it is. Here, MSI has hit a solid six with the Prestige 13 AI+, tipping the scales at just 830g, some 69g less than the advertised weight.

That's an impressive achievement when you consider that a 13.6in MacBook Air weighs over 1.2Kg. The new MSI is even a few grams lighter than Asus' feather-light Zenbook A14.

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At 299 x 210 x 15.9mm this new Prestige is also usefully small. For comparison, both the 13.3in Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x Gen 11 and 14in Lenovo ThinkPad T14s are both heavier and larger.

Making a laptop as light as a feather is easy if you don't mind sacrificing solidity, but the body of the Prestige 13 AI+ is made from an aluminium-magnesium alloy and is impressively robust and stiff.

The Prestige is also rated MIL-STD-810H/G-resistant to the slings and arrows of outrageous misuse such as extreme vibration and changes in pressure and temperature.

It's a handsome little machine too in its fingerprint-resistant Platinum Grey colorway with MSI's new script logo etched on the lid. The slightly too-thick 11mm plastic bezel above the screen does detract from the looks, but at least the space is used to house a webcam privacy shutter and the IR gubbins for Windows Hello. On the subject of the lid, we like the way it rotates downward at the back when opened, thus adding around 8mm to the height of the deck at the back. That makes for a more agreeable typing angle.

With the likes of Apple and Dell embracing an all-Type-C philosophy when it comes to ports, we're happy to see MSI buck the trend. With two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two 5Gbps USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 video output, a 3.5mm audio jack and a MicroSD card reader, the little MSI is actually better equipped than its big brother, which lacks a card reader. Over-the-air connectivity is provided by an Intel Killer BE1775 WLAN card, which supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth v6.0.

Getting inside is no problem, but once in, all you can do is swap out the 2280 SDD, replace the battery, and blow dust out of the single fan. Everything else is fixed firmly in place, and there's no room for a second SSD,

MSI Prestige 13 AI+: Keyboard, touchpad, and webcam

Squeezing a full-size keyboard into the footprint of a 13.3in laptop is never the recipe for a spacious layout, but MSI has done a decent enough job of putting a pint into a half-pint bottle.

The only part of the keyboard that looks and feels rather cramped is the bottom-right corner, where the half-height arrow keys, half-height page-up and page-down keys, and the half-width Copilot and forward-slash/pipe keys all jostle for space.

On a positive note, by moving the forward-slash key to the right of the space bar, room has been made for a double-width left shift key, which, on balance, we think is a good compromise.

The keyboard deck itself is solid with little flex evident even under hard pressure, and the typing action is nigh on perfect: light, precise and with a well-damped end-stop.

The three-level white backlight shines through the translucent side walls of the keycaps as well as the white graphics on the top, which is a design that always finds favour in the ITPro office.

We're not massive fans of the position of the power/fingerprint scanner button, which sits inboard of the Delete key. Granted, it's recessed, but it's still a little too easy to press it accidentally while aiming for the Delete button.

The 120 x 75mm Mylar touchpad isn't the largest around, but it works reliably, interpreting all the swipes, taps and gestures we threw at it correctly, and the click-action is light, crisp and quiet.

The 1080p webcam is pretty standard fare, but it's bright and colorful and not thrown off its stride by sudden changes in ambient lighting. The physical privacy shutter next to the lens is a welcome feature, as is support for Windows Hello facial recognition as a biometric partner to the fingerprint reader.

MSI Prestige 13 AI+: Display

With a 2,880 x 1,800 matrix squeezed into a 13.3in panel, the Prestige 13 AI+'s OLED screen is as sharp as they come, with a pixel density of 255ppi, better even than the 224ppi of the 13.6-inch MacBook Air.

The Samsung-made panel registered a peak brightness level of 390cd/m2 in SDR mode and 630cd/m2 in HDR and certainly qualifies as wide-gamut with color space volumes of 160% sRGB, 113.8% DCI-P3 and 110.7% Adobe RGB.

The screen has what we'd describe as an anti-reflective but still semi-gloss finish. It does a decent but not perfect job of keeping reflections at bay, but it's not quite good enough, nor is the display quite bright enough, for easy use outdoors in sunlight.

The display is, however, accurate enough for those professionally concerned with such matters, returning sound Delta E color variances of 1.03 against the Display P3 profile and 1.18 vs the sRGB profile. The refresh rate is capped at 60Hz but for a compact productivity laptop that's a minor annoyance rather than a deal breaker.

MSI Prestige 13 AI+: Specs and performance

The Prestige 13 AI+ is built around the same Intel Core Ultra 7 355 CPU as the Prestige 16 AI+. This is a 4.7GHz Panther Lake CPU with 8 cores, 4 of which are deemed Performance and 4 Low Power Efficient. The chipset also features the Intel Graphics iGPU with 4 Xe cores, a 49 TOPS NPU, and 32GB of fixed quad-channel LPDDR5x RAM.

In the Geekbench 6 tests, the baby MSI scored 2,680 in the single-core test, 10,939 in the multi-core test, and 23,498 in the OpenCL GPU test. Those CPU numbers are not too shabby, but the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x Gen 11 has them beaten (3,215 single-core, 11,705 multi-core), as does the M5 MacBook Air (4,199 and 17,213).

The difference isn't something you'll notice in everyday use running basic productivity applications or while jumping between multiple SaaS apps in browser tabs; in those circumstances the Prestige 13 AI+ never feels less than slick and responsive.

Where the Core Ultra 7 355 (and Core Ultra 5 325) chipsets stumble is with graphics performance. That's because they make do with a 4 Xe core iGPU rather than the 10-core Arc B370 or 12-core B390 iGPUs that partner the more powerful Series 3 Core Ultra CPUs.

The difference in graphics performance is shown in stark relief by the Geekbench OpenCL test scores. The M5 MacBook Air scored 47,627, double the MSI machine, while laptops using the Arc B390 iGPU can easily top 55,000.

The little Prestige ran the SPECviewperf 3ds Max modelling benchmark at 18.7fps which is around half the speed you'll get from a B390 GPU.

Even if it's no stump-puller, the chipset at least goes about its business without drama. Even in Performance mode, both the CPU and GPU ran at near full utilisation for extended periods, and the single fan never generated more than a gentle whisper.

You could easily flog this little MSI like the family mule in a quiet library and rest easy knowing that you won't get admonishing stares from the person sitting at the next desk.

In our standard battery test, which involves looping a video in VLC with the display set to 170cd/m2, the 53.8Wh battery inside the MSI kept the lights on for 15hrs and 6mins.

That's within a margin of error the same as the 13.6-inch M5 MacBook Air but a country mile off the very best, such as the 27-odd hours we got from the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x Gen 11, which runs on a Snapdragon X2 platform.

As little as a year ago a 15-hour runtime from a Windows laptop would have been regarded as top-notch. How times have changed. That said, the Prestige 13 AI+ will still easily get you through a long day at work, or an even longer flight, without the need to recharge.

MSI Prestige 13 AI+: Is it worth it?

MSI's new baby business laptop makes a very strong case for itself. The price is certainly right given that you are getting a high-quality 2.8K OLED screen, 32GB of RAM, and a very good selection of ports into the bargain.

It's also one of the smallest and lightest compact laptops on the market, and it's been made thus without sacrificing an ounce of usability or practicality.

What issues we have with the MSI Prestige 13 AI+ are down to its Intel chipset. At the highest end, we've been impressed by the performance of Panther Lake silicon, but at the lower end it's being shown a clean pair of heels by the latest ARM chipsets from Apple and Qualcomm, with the latter also delivering far superior battery run times.

For general-purpose computing, then this baby MSI can be thoroughly recommended, but if you need rather more in the way of graphics power it might be worth looking at the ARM-powered alternatives from Apple and Lenovo listed above.

MSI Prestige 13 AI+: Specs