MSI Modern 14 Review

MSI is best known for its game goods, like the Stealth (review) and GF63 laptops, but it also makes business and work notebooks. Summit, Prestige, and Modern are the three series in this group. The MSI Modern 14 is a new model from the Modern series. It is a mid-range office laptop with fewer features than the brand’s other products. Still, it brags about being current in how it looks and works. All of this fits into a small, nice-looking body that should also be easy to carry around. This is a review of the MSI Modern 14 (B11MO-235IN) from Smartprix. Let’s find out what the answer is.

MSI Modern 14 Specs

Build Quality

MSI offers the Modern 14 in three colours: Beige Mousse, Blue Stone, and Carbon Grey. The first one is shown off by the test unit I have with me. What a fancy name, huh, Beige Mousse? Well, the rose-gold colour certainly stands out. The logos on the cover and below the screen are slightly shiny. With a weight of 1.3 kg and small size, you wouldn’t feel its weight on your lap. This also means moving around and packing up should be accessible when you’re back at the office or on the road. For wireless connections, you get wifi six and Bluetooth 5.1. On the left side is a DCIN power port, an HDMI port that can handle 4K60 video, a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 4, DisplayPort, but no charging, and a microSD card slot. On the other hand, the right side has two USB A ports, an audio combo jack, and LED lights. The need for an internet port stands out.

Keyboard

Below is a TKL keyboard with 84 keys and 1.5mm of pivotal movement. The tops of the keys are big. On the control keys, there are quick ways to do things. Even though I don’t understand why some keys, like Delete and Function, are where they are, I could type quickly once I got the hang of it. The white lighting looks good and can be turned down to two more levels or turned off completely. The trackpad below is acceptable for the job, as it can be used with more than one finger and responds well enough. On either side of it, there are plenty of places to rest your hands.

Performance

With a text password, you can get into 64-bit Windows 10 Home, which already has a few apps. This includes the CyberLink suite of editing audio and video apps, Norton security, Music Maker Jam, Nahimic Audio Buddy, Remote Desktop, and MSI Centre. If you don’t want to use these, you can eliminate them. It would be best to keep the MSI Centre because it lets you change the speed modes and gives you some system tools and information. The Intel 11th-generation Core i5-1135G7 chip is at the heart of Modern 14. This chip is a quad-core 10nm chip with eight threads, a base clock speed of 2.40GHz, and a boost clock speed of 4.20GHz. This is paired with an 8MB L3 cache, 8GB of single-channel DDR4 RAM (3200MHz), and 512GB of M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD storage. The RAM only has one channel, but you can take out the 8GB RAM chip that came with it and put up to 32GB in its place. But if you need more space, look at the higher versions of this laptop. The setup suits most regular jobs that must be done across periods. The system starts up quickly.

Visual

After opening the lid, a 14-inch LCD screen with a 1080p resolution, 60Hz frame rate, and 47% NTSC colour representation will appear. This setting is good enough for everyday work and watching media. Whether it’s the beautiful but horrifying scenes of Castlevania on Netflix or the sad world of Dia in 2020, the presentation is good. It is very bright, has a shine that cuts down on glare and can be used both inside and outside. There are a few ways to look at it.

In the same way, a creative worker needs to know the colour range. Use the 3.5mm output, which was nice. But the wifi sound was a little slow. The LatencyMon says the same thing. For video calls, the built-in mics work fine. The camera is a standard 720p at 30FPS monitor that doesn’t have an IR projector. This means that the video quality could be better, and you don’t have the choice to use Windows Hello Face unlocking. As well, there is no fingerprint reader.

Graphics

Even though the MSI Modern 14 is not a game laptop, it has a specialised graphics card, which is pretty cool. In particular, the l laptop graphics card made by NVIDIA is called GeForce MX450. The base frequency of this graphics card is 1395 MHz, and the boost frequency is 1575 MHz. Also, the graphics card has a 2 GB GDDR5 VRAM reserved for it. With this graphics card, the MSI Modern 14 can handle tasks like video editing requiring much graphics power. It should also be able to play some AAA games. To better understand how well the laptop’s graphics work, I’ll now tell you how it did on the 3DMark speed test.

For clarity, 3DMark is a benchmarking tool that checks how well a computer can create 3D and 2D images. Also, a good result is shown by a high score on the test. The MSI Modern 14 scored 8435 points in this area, a long way below the average of 12928 points for the group. Still, the laptop did better than most in class, including the ASUS Zenbook 14 UX435EG. On the 3DMark 11 test, this ASUS laptop, which also has an NVIDIA GeForce MX450, got 6524 points.