MSI Creator 15 - Review 2022
MSI'south aptly named Creator 15 (starts at $ane,499; $1,999 every bit tested) is designed for creative piece of work, such as photo and video editing. Our exam laptop'due south eight-cadre Intel Core i7 processor and XXL-size battery distinguish it by delivering splendid performance and almost 10 hours of unplugged life. Although a few items keep information technology from earning our Editors' Choice award (including a hot-running chassis and some keyboard quibbles), we recommend information technology over the Asus ProArt StudioBook fifteen for its superior feature set. Information technology's as well a adept alternative to the Razer Blade 15 Base Model, which doesn't offer every bit much performance for the money.
More Than a Jazzed-Upwardly Gaming Notebook
The Creator 15 is closely related to MSI's GS66 Stealth. It swaps that gaming model'south loftier-refresh display for a bear upon-enabled ane; changes out the RGB-rainbow keyboard backlighting for white-only lights; and goes with a gray, instead of a blackness, chassis. There are also software differences that I'll cover later.
The Creator 15's handsome gray exterior is all metallic and well-synthetic. I similar that the lid can exist opened to 180 degrees flat, a potentially useful position given its touch-input display.
At 0.72 by 14.1 by 9.8 inches (HWD), this laptop is wholly portable for one packing a xv.half dozen-inch screen. MSI lists its weight at 4.63 pounds, though it registered at a still-adequate 5 pounds on my scale.
My test unit's full Hard disk drive (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screen checks all the of import boxes for creative work. Its slick display surface produces a clear picture and, surprisingly, lacks the distracting reflections of some glossy screens. Its hinges are properly stiff to minimize wobble for bear upon apply, yet they all the same allow one-handed lid opening.
Good color coverage (MSI rates this panel for 72 percent of NTSC gamut, or shut to 100 percent of the more commonly referenced sRGB) and ample brightness seal the bargain.
The Keyboard: Usable, But Imperfect
Comfortably sized keys and two levels of white backlighting are the highlights for the Creator 15's island-style keyboard. A shallow 1.5mm of key travel makes it piece of cake to blazon quickly, only the tactile feedback is minimal.
This keyboard'due south layout problems stem from its origins on MSI gaming notebooks. The wider-than-normal left Ctrl cardinal forces the Function (Fn) key to the right of the spacebar, making Fn-primal combos peculiarly difficult. Swapping the Fn primal with the Windows primal in the MSI Creator Centre app trades 1 problem for another by making Windows-key usage as difficult. I as well dislike the undersize right Ctrl key.
The Creator Eye app is specific to MSI's Creator notebooks. Its headline feature is its ability to prioritize the performance of artistic apps by allocating computing resources as needed. I can't speak to its effectiveness since I didn't have a examination scenario relevant to one of the modes.
The app also provides a silent mode for the cooling fans and a setting that limits battery charge to preserve the battery's health, a useful feature for a notebook that is usually plugged in.
Dorsum in the physical realm, an extra-wide buttonless touchpad is perhaps the Creator fifteen'southward nigh center-catching feature.
From tranquillity physical clicks (achieved by pressing downwardly on the pad) to a slick surface, it nails the fundamentals. Its excess width could be useful for tracking wide in apps like Photoshop, though I didn't realize a benefit for day-to-mean solar day usage.
And then-And so Connectivity, But Good Biometrics
The Creator 15 has Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 connectivity courtesy of its Intel AX201 wireless card; I had no trouble getting either signal through walls in my house. Meanwhile, it gets at least one thing right about physical connectivity: multifariousness. Thunderbolt 3 (on a USB Type-C connector), total-size HDMI two.0, and a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port grace its left; an audio philharmonic jack (headphone/microphone), a USB 3.ii Gen 2 Type-C port, a total-size SD card reader, and Ethernet its right.
What it doesn't go right is quantity. Including just one USB Type-A port is shortsighted. The other practical consequence is that, since almost of the ports are located forward (toward the user) of the midpoint on each edge, plugged-in devices tend to jut out and intrude on external-mouse territory or elbow-resting space.
The Creator xv does better with biometrics by offering both an infrared webcam and a fingerprint reader. The cam's 720p video quality is only passable, but it'south comparable to other notebook PCs in this price range.
Adept speakers are some other plus for this laptop. Located on either side of the palm balance, they take total sound and project nicely.
Powerful Parts for the Money: The Creator 15's Configurations
Under the hood of my $1,999 Creator 15 model A10SFT-053US is an eight-core/16-thread Intel Core i7-10875H processor (2.3GHz base; up to 5.1GHz boost), an 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (Max-Q) GPU, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB solid-state drive loaded with Windows 10 Pro. MSI includes just a ane-year warranty, albeit with international coverage.
All told, information technology's powerful hardware for the coin. Most notebooks in this price range include simply a six-core/12-thread Core i7 chip, like the Razer Blade xv Base Edition; the $ii,299 information technology commands similarly equipped is a hefty premium for its admittedly gorgeous OLED 4K/UHD touch display. Meanwhile, the Creator fifteen is a downright bargain side by side to the $2,749 non-touch HP ZBook 15 Create G7, though HP's standard warranty is three years.
The Creator 15 tin can be had for less dosh in its $1,499 A10SE-421 model; information technology downgrades to a six-core/12-thread Core i7 processor, a non-touch display, and a 6GB GeForce RTX 2060, while, strangely, doubling the solid-state storage (to 1TB).
Testing the Creator 15: Viii Cores Bring Musculus
For our benchmark tests, I compared the Creator xv to the following notebooks whose basic specifications are listed below.
This is a heavy-lifting crowd. The Dell Precision 7540 is a business-grade workstation rather than a artistic-focused machine; I included both it and the Razer Blade xv Studio Edition to demonstrate what their Quadro graphics cards can do in our workstation tests. Last, the Aorus 15G gaming notebook is here as a performance sanity check; information technology shares the aforementioned processor as the Creator xv.
Storage, Media, and CPU Tests
The Creator 15 was strong out of the gate with an impressive six,181-signal score in PCMark x, our organisation-performance cess that simulates existent-world productivity and content-creation workflows. Nosotros look for at least 4,000 points in that test, then this is a top-course showing. Meanwhile, it matched the others in our PCMark eight storage drive criterion.
A pair of CPU-crunching tests come next: Cinebench R15 stresses all available processor cores and threads while rendering a complex prototype, and in our Handbrake test, we transcode a 12-minute 4K video down to 1080p.
The Creator 15 generally kept upwards with the Aorus 15G despite existence a little off the stride in Cinebench R15. The six-core Core i7 chips in the Asus and the Razer kept them out of the running.
We also utilize POV-Ray three.7 to appraise processor performance in creative notebooks. Its built-in criterion ray-traces a three-dimensional image using only the processor, non the graphics carte du jour.
The six-core Asus showed some spunk, but the Creator 15 was close enough to the faster Dell.
The Creator 15 likewise performed sensibly in our concluding test in this department: photograph editing. We utilize an early 2022 release of Adobe Photoshop Creative Deject to apply 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG paradigm, timing each functioning and calculation up the totals. This exam is not as CPU-focused as Cinebench or Handbrake, bringing the functioning of the storage subsystem, memory, and GPU into play.
Workstation and Graphics Tests
Our first ii benchmarks in this section measure the gaming performance potential of a PC. In UL'south 3DMark, we run the Sky Diver (lightweight, capable of running on integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, for high-finish gaming PCs) tests, both DirectX 11-based. Unigine Corp.'south Superposition is the other; it uses a different rendering engine to produce a complex 3D scene.
The Creator xv scored well in both benchmarks for a notebook with a GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q, predictably coming in just behind the Aorus 15G and its GeForce RTX 2070 Super Max-Q. The Quadro RTX 5000 used by the Dell and the Razer is based on the GeForce RTX 2080, which ofttimes performs similarly (as it does here) to the GeForce RTX 2070 in notebook form. Neither benchmark utilizes Quadro-specific features.
On the topic of gaming, I ran our gaming tests on the Creator fifteen even though it'due south non billed equally a gaming automobile. Nosotros use the born 1080p benchmarks in Far Cry 5 (at its Normal and Ultra presets) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (at its Medium and Very Loftier presets). Far Cry 5 uses DirectX 11, while we flip Rise of the Tomb Raider to DirectX 12.
Operation isn't what prevents the Creator 15 from being a great gaming notebook; its numbers far exceed the sixty-frame-per-second average required for smooth gameplay. Rather, its 60Hz screen means information technology can't evangelize the ultra-smooth experience of the 144Hz or better screens that typically grace gaming notebooks with its kind of ability.
Allow's move on to our workstation-focused Cinebench R15 OpenGL benchmark, which taps the hardware rendering capabilities of the GPU.
Though this is an older and mostly CPU-limited test, the Dell and Razer still finished ahead of the Creator xv thanks to their OpenGL-optimized Quadros.
Our adjacent, and most workstation-savvy, benchmark is SPECviewperf 13, which renders and rotates wireframe models using real-earth viewsets from popular ISV apps.
The Creator fifteen's numbers imply that it tin can power these apps to a limited degree, only its GeForce hardware isn't optimized for them. The Creo and SolidWorks numbers from the Dell and the Razer plainly illustrate this. Merely all hope isn't lost; MSI offers Quadros in the Creator xv'due south very same chassis in the grade of the MSI WS66.
Bombardment Rundown Test
For our last benchmark, we mensurate a laptop's unplugged runtime while playing a locally stored video with screen brightness at 50 percentage and audio volume at 100 pct. We use the notebook'south energy-saving rather than balanced or other power contour, turn off Wi-Fi, and even disable keyboard backlighting to clasp as much life as possible out of the arrangement.
The 99-watt-hour bombardment stuffed into the Creator 15 is the largest that the TSA allows in carry-on flights. Six minutes shy of 10 hours is exemplary for a notebook in this class.
In the Heat of the...Chassis: Thermals
The Creator 15 doesn't quite master the thermal challenge of packing lots of power into a sparse, metallic chassis, however, equally our FLIR I Pro imaging shows...
The centre of the keyboard reached an alarming 129 degrees F, or about 20 degrees higher than I prefer to see. The underside of the notebook felt just as hot despite half of it being perforated for airflow.
The Creator xv's three fans are audible while running demanding apps, but the overall racket level is no higher than it normally is for this class of notebook. Importantly, the fans are well-behaved for general tasks since they don't constantly vary their RPMs. The Creator 15 tin can run silently at the expense of some performance past using the Creator Centre app that I mentioned earlier.
A notebook that offers cooler temperatures and lower noise levels is the Asus ProArt StudioBook fifteen, though information technology comes at the price of performance, a webcam, and biometric features.
A Creditable Creative Machine
MSI'due south Creator 15 combines the right features to earn our general recommendation. These include a stylish-even so-professional design; up to an viii-core Intel Core i7 processor; a artistic-friendly bear on display; a standard IR camera, fingerprint reader, and Wi-Fi half-dozen; and almost 10 hours of battery life in our testing. That'south an impressive resume for any artistic notebook.
Though its inclusion of just one USB Blazon-A port, and its hot-running chassis, keep it from our Editors' Choice medal circular, those downsides may exist worth swallowing. The Creator 15 offers noticeably amend performance than the Asus ProArt StudioBook fifteen and the Razer Bract fifteen Base Edition for the same or less money. Listen the heat, simply put it on the short list.
MSI Creator fifteen Specs
| Laptop Class | Workstation |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-10875H |
| Processor Speed | 2.3 GHz |
| RAM (as Tested) | 16 GB |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Boot Drive Chapters (every bit Tested) | 512 GB |
| Screen Size | 15.half dozen inches |
| Native Display Resolution | i,920 by 1,080 |
| Affect Screen | Yes |
| Panel Technology | IPS |
| Variable Refresh Support | None |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 60 Hz |
| Graphics Processor | Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (Max-Q) |
| Graphics Retentiveness | 8 GB |
| Wireless Networking | 802.11ax, Bluetooth |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 0.72 by 14.11 by 9.76 inches |
| Weight | iv.63 lbs |
| Operating Organisation | Windows 10 Pro |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 9:54 |
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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/netbooks-products/39244/msi-creator-15
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