While it’s a little disappointing to see the HP Spectre 14t and Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 basically match its performance for hundreds of dollars less, the MSI Summit E13 Flip makes up its value again with its expanded feature set over these 2-in-1s.Īt 8 hours of battery life, the Summit E13 Flip can last through the workday, but it won't make it to bedtime.
This means the Summit E13 Flip is fantastic for multitasking, so you won’t see much lag if you’re running Spotify, two dozen Chrome tabs, a PDF viewer, and Slack at the same time. The HP Spectre 14t and Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 are the only 2-in-1s to edge it out by less than forty points, although the Apple M1 pulls ahead by 18% with 1730 points. In Geekbench 5, which we use to test raw processing power, it scored 1468 points, one of the highest scores we’ve seen from a laptop. This laptop’s strength lies in its single core performance.
(If you want higher frame rates, turn the resolution down to 720p and set the graphics preset to low.) Laptops with AMD integrated graphics or Apple M1 processors beat it by a few frames (between two and 10 frames per second depending on the laptop), but those looking for a better gaming experience should be looking at laptops with discrete graphics cards, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 or the HP Pavilion Gaming 15.
The Summit E13 Flip pulled 22 frames per second in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p on the highest graphical preset, which is fine for integrated graphics. Its GPU power is passable, but this laptop is no gaming machine. The Summit E13 Flip performs about as well as any other laptop with the Intel Core i7-1185G7 and integrated graphics, but it’s disappointing to see this laptop bested by laptops that cost way less money (even if those laptops lack the same features). The gap grows wider when we compare the E13 to the MacBook Air’s video encoding: in Handbrake, the Summit took 14 minutes and 42 seconds to encode a 12-minute film in 4K to 1080p, twice as long as it the MacBook Air. That’s over a minute longer than it took the M1 MacBook Air to render the same scene, and nearly three minutes more than the Asus Zenbook with a current-gen Ryzen 7. When rendering a 3D scene of a BMW car in Blender, the Summit E13 Flip took seven minutes and 57 seconds to produce the still image. (But there will be a higher tier model available with the Core i7-1195G7 soon.) Apple’s M1 chip in the MacBook Pro 13 and MacBook Air has about twice the amount of multi-core performance, though, which means the Summit E13 Flip is not the fastest laptop for tasks like 3D rendering and video transcoding. Our model’s CPU multi-core performance is slightly slower than some of the other premium notebooks we’ve tested, like the new Dell XPS 13.
The MSI Summit E13 Flip is no doubt a powerful machine, but there is room for improvement. The hardware can handle heavy loads, but there are laptops better suited to scene rendering and 3D graphics if that's a priority for you. I found it uncomfortable hovering my hand above the screen, which made drawing lines and tilted strokes difficult. Compared to the Apple Pencil for iPads, the MSI Pen is a decent option for Windows 2-in-1s, but it would have been better with palm rejection. However, the laptop’s touch screen does not have palm rejection, so the stylus works best when your hand is off the screen. The touch screen is very responsive and easy to use in tablet mode or regular mode, and the pen works just as well. If you need to do color-sensitive work as a student or starting professional, the screen will do for sRGB, but it may not be the best for HDR content as the display does not officially support it.
The colors are on point, with bright and vivid tones throughout the full sRGB color gamut. The Summit E13 Flip’s screen can go up to 515 nits-way brighter than a MacBook Pro, and bright enough that you could take it on a sunny picnic without any issues.
The screen is very bright and vibrant, making it a good choice for movie lovers.