MSI SUMMIT E13 FLIP EVO A12MT-013 13.4" FHD+ INTEL CORE I7-1260P 1.5GHZ / 32GB RAM / 1TB SSD

smargo

11.01.2023

I have this laptop for a couple of weeks. Usually, I have severe eye strain from OLED and PWM displays, the  panel in Summit is great and very easy on the eyes. I also love SD card slot. But the battery life seems to be horrible: I am getting around 3 hours under lite load in "Balanced" mode. In other modes, e.g. "Silent" it is way too slow, lagging on the simplest tasks. Is the unit defective or is this normal? Reviews were indicating great battery life.

MrCat

20.05.2021

Quote from: PsychDoc on May 19, 2021, 04:14:31 Quote from: PsychDoc on May 19, 2021, 04:14:31 Quote from: Mothertrucker19 Thanks for your feedback. With all those issues, returning it was/is the right thing to do. MSI has done a lot of things right on their first attempt but at this price point it's indeed unacceptable to have random crashes while doing normal tasks like the zoom calls or having bad Wifi. There was another mention about bad wifi on Amazon which makes me start believing that this might be a design/hardware issue. I was really looking forward to this convertible but at it's launch price it's just not worth it. Me too. MSI didn't advertise this convertible with 120 Hz though... anyway NBC should update it's review or at least mention that the 120 Hz panel is not available everywhere. In it's current form the article is very misleading. 120 Hz variants seem to be available in Asia or in the US only, definitely not in Europe, which is very unfortunate because this would've been a good selling point..

Mothertrucker19

19.05.2021

Quote from: MrCat on May 07, 2021, 21:05:43 Quote from: MrCat on May 07, 2021, 21:05:43 I hope this gets coverage. Europe already gets worse deals usually, but now worse hardware too.

Dorby

19.05.2021

@PsychDoc: HP, Lenovo and Dell have 5 Support options when you configure and buy their laptops through their business portal: - Upgrade all warranties up to 5 years Extended - Accidental Damage Protection - Next day On-Site Technician Support - Global Warranty - Premium Online / Mail-in / Return Support. Something people overlook a lot, but they're nice to have. Especially the ADP which covers all types of damage, repair and component replacement. As MSI's first-gen attempt at something like this, this product is absolutely bound to have some basic usability issues, although it looks like you might've been more unlucky.

PsychDoc

19.05.2021

Quote from: MrCat on May 14, 2021, 16:01:29 Quote from: MrCat on May 14, 2021, 16:01:29 I've been working a lot of hours. I'll give you a short rundown. After using it for the last 14 days, I'm ready to comment on some additional things. The pen input is amazing. Much better than both of the surface pros that I've owned. The battery life is quite good when you set the MSI command center power option to either "quiet" or "save battery". I didn't have the chance to do a full test, but I would use it for 6 hours off a charge writing notes most of the time, and I'd still have 60% left. I've since played a few other titles and it's performed incredibly well for an ultra-portable. I've had no issues with throttling either. But there's 4 minor issues, and 1 big one. 1. The keyboard sometimes doesn't know when it is flipped and in tablet mode. (especially after waking from sleep). So I have to open and close to fix this, which is a little irritating to have to do sitting with a client when I need to just be taking notes. 2. The battery had some weirdness that more or less went away after a few charge/discharge cycles (though the battery controller is apparently reporting to windows 10 that it's a 67k mah battery that overcharges to 69K, but whatever). 3. It's happened a few times where bluetooth just wasn't there. No option to turn it on. Probably some weird driver issue. 4. WiFi sometimes was weirdly spotty and I was getting wifi wake from sleep initialization errors in the logfiles. And the big issue is... The thiing has crashed on me 9 times in 15 days. 5 times while gaming, and 4 times while doing video calls with clients. Windows event error log reports this was due to a fatal hardware issue each time. Unfortunately I haven't had time to do further benchmarking due to work being crazy busy. But I think it's simply unacceptable for a $1600 laptop. If it weren't for the crashes and wifi, I'd keep it. It's probably a driver issue. But I'm worried about a hardware issue somewhere, and i'm not willing to risk it. It's going back to bestbuy tomorrow. I am not sure what their exchange policy is. If they extend me another 15 day trial period, I'd be happy to try another one out for 15 days to see if I just got a bad unit. I liked it that much. If that isn't the case I'll just return it. I'm just not willing to gamble that kind of money on a system that won't last me at least 4 years. I am not sure what I'd buy instead  HP customer service scares me (I used to do a side hustle of building systems and fixing computers back when I was in college and they were atrocious back then. I've read they haven't gotten much better), and with the crap going on recently with Dell I'm not sure I want an XPS either. Such a bummer. I really wanted it to work out.

MrCat

14.05.2021

Still waiting for your feedback Psychdoc  ;)

MrCat

07.05.2021

Thanks PsychDoc! Perhaps you could test Call of Duty Warzone. It might not run well on Iris XE Graphics but there's a video on YouTube from a Dell Inspiron 7506 2-in-1 with an Intel 1165G7 and Iris XE 96 EU running it with decent FPS. Yes, that Dell is a 15" convertible but perhaps the E13 Flip might be able to have similar performance given it's benchmark/stresstest results. However I'm not happy at all with MSI's policy: after exchanging a couple of E-Mails with an MSI rep., somehow they decided to put 60 Hz panels in the european variants instead of 120 Hz. While this might be good for battery life, it changes the user experience drastically. I found a spanish review which "strangely" reported that the panel ran at 60 Hz. At first I thought it was a mistake, mostly because the panels have the same reference (LQ134N1JW53) but indeed it seems that there might be different revisions and europeans get the lesser one. I don't believe this can be changed with an updated firmware. This is just like what Samsung does every year with the Snapdragon and Exynos variants on it's high end smartphones. Tbh I find this very disappointing and a major deal breaker, especially considering the version with 32GB and 1TB costs around 2000€ here (which would be something like 2430 $). I was willing to accept the ghosting and the sub-par SD-Card and WLAN speeds but with this they've gone a bit too far.  >:( I'm still looking forward for your feedback though  ;)

PsychDoc

06.05.2021

Quote from: MrCat on May 06, 2021, 15:25:57 Quote from: MrCat on May 06, 2021, 15:25:57 For sure! I am going away for the weekend on family trip, but i'll do some more testing next week including wifi speeds, battery life, SD card and ssd transfer speeds and post up the results. I wouldn't mind posting them to Reddit either. I have been a long time lurker on there so maybe it's time I actually contribute something. 😜 I'll check hwinfo and let you know maybe today. Also, fan noise and coil whine aren't egregious. Just present. But sure I'll shoot a video. Fyi - There were no weird throttle issues yesterday despite a two hour gaming session. I was on me3 multiplayer again, running 2560x1080 @ 60 hz on platinum with three other players while playing an n7 fury (tons of particle effects, plus the geth scanner overlay) as host. (The game uses the host computer as the server). I got 60fps ( game capped) the whole time with some occassional drops to 45 fps when swarmed. Sure, it's an old game but considering I'm doing 1440p (through an ultrawide mod) and have dynamic shadows and antialiasing switched on, I think hitting the max limited frame rate is pretty good for an Ultrabook. I did have the laptop on a stand so that may have helped. I wasn't logging, but temps seemed perfectly fine. I will run other games next week and will also see if I can get the cpu and gpu to overheat. I'll also do some more gaming on the internal screen then. It's just that I am 44 years old and hate gaming on tiny screens. It also doesn't help that the me3 stock reticle is light blue and blends right into the background. My gaming monitor has an onboard bright red reticle. It's so much easier to pop off headshots with it, and it's immensely satisfying topping the scoreboard consistently as a 44 year old geezer (by gamer standards) on platinum runs... even on a 10 year old game.  I love science, but I have my limits. Most of my current gen games are on PS4. I do own the Witcher and skyrim for PC,  but any suggestions for current gen games? I'm a huge souls fan, so I am thinking of trying out dark souls 1 remastered.

MrCat

06.05.2021

Thanks! Please report back once you've done some more testing. Unfortunately there aren't so many reviews online hence why your findings are very useful. I'm hoping this throttle issue gets fixed with a future BIOS update (hopefully during your return period). As an eGPU user this wouldn't matter that much but this still far from ideal. I'm wondering how many PCIe Lines were assigned to the SD-Card reader. The Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 that I have achieves higher speeds than the X1 Gen 3 Tablet because it has more lanes assigned to it. On the other hand, NVMe is capped at 2x on the 5290 Tablet while on the X1 Tablet it's 4x. I'm wondering if this could be the reason why the speeds were so low. This can be checked with HWInfo. I'm not sure if the same relates to WLAN - I wouldn't be impressed if MSI cheaped out on the antennas because other convertibles in this price range do more than 1000 Mbit/s. Coil whine is always annoying. Would you be willing on doing a video about it? Perhaps you could post your impressions on reddit too  :) Thanks! ;)