Right now notebooks are flying out the door as work from home employees, look to upgrade,  MSI is a Company that’s know more for gaming and high performance notebooks but it was a brand new product that caught my eye in light of what is happening due to the Coronavirus.

An all new $2,699 MSI Modern 15 notebook arrived at our office as we were all exiting to work from home, and when I opened the box I was half expecting a top end gaming machine, what was inside was a really decent business notebook that I believe gives them a seat in the B2b or home market.

MSI is a PC engineering Company and it shows in the design of the Modern 15 it’s sturdy yet stylish and not as heavy at 1.6 kilo as it looks.

The standout is the superb keyboard, the keys are big and responsive which is what I like in a notebook.

The keyboard is actually larger than full-sized—it felt really easy to type on and the larger space between keys makes a big difference.

Along the edge of this machine there are two Thunderbolt 3 ports, an HDMI video output, and an audio jack. You’ll find two USB 3.2 Type-A ports and a microSD card slot on the right.

The webcam centered above the display is not an IR face-recognition camera, but you can still use Windows Hello to bypass typing passwords thanks to a fingerprint reader in a corner of the large touchpad.

This is also an i7 notebook and what MSI has done is successfully marry the performance of the Core i7-10510U Comet Lake-U quad-core CPU and the Nvidia GeForce MX250 GPU that delivers really performance for the price.

Boot time is quick and the 1080p display screen clear, I recommend you set it on 50 in the display settings for a really bright screen.

I was able to use my Office 365 apps and my Adobe Creative Cloud tools on this machine without any performance lag

The 15.6-inch screen delivered ample room and was comfortable when using a package such as Fireworks to manipulate an image.

You immediately notice the sleek lightweight aluminium chassis and the display delivers up to 90% Screen-to-body ratio with 180° rotation so that one can easily flip the display screen back so that one can easily share the screen.

Would I buy this over a Surface?

My response is yes, because it does everything that a Surface does but the case and overall feel of the machine is a lot more sturdier and the performance appears to be a lot better than a lot of their competitors including a HP Spectre that we are currently testing.

It’s akin to an engineered product Vs a mass-produced product.

Making great PC’s and notebooks especially for the gaming market is what MSI do, the Microsoft Surface comes from a Company whose core business is not PC hardware and when compared to the Modern 15 it clearly shows.

The Modern 15 is a classic affordable machine that’s as good if not better than a lot of their competitors including the HP Spectre x360, Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 -15, Asus ZenBook 15, or Dell XPS 15.

On board is 64GB of Memory which delivers ample performance.

To me this machine is a three in one, capable of delivering business, creative and gaming performance from one machine.

The NVIDIA GeForce MX330 graphics card accelerates this machine delivering 2X faster performance over a lot of their competitors this makes it ideal for photo editing, video editing, and gaming.

It also worked seamlessly with NVIDIA Optimus technology allowing me to get a good day’s performance out of this machine.

Another performance plus was given to this machine due to MSI’s exclusive Cooler Boost 3 Technology, with 2 dedicated fans and 3 heat pipes. We recently reviewed the top end ASUS Zen Book Pro and withing 15 minutes the device was seriously warm with the Modern 15 we noticed no heat build-up despite running several creative apps.

Conclusion.
This is a performance machine that is ideal for a road warrior or someone who wants a solid high-performance business machine that can be used to process creative work while being there for the quick game.

At $2,699 it’s up there with more expensive machines and I am confident that this will be one of those machines that goes on performing for a long time.

For the work from home user this is an ideal investment, what I would have liked to have seen as part of the package is a protection case.

RATING: 9/10