The MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) impresses with its beefy power thanks to Intel's top of the line Arrow Lake-H chip, as well as its fantastic battery life, lightweight chassis and solid display. It's little, but important, things that let it down against the competition such as its weaker port selection and spongier feeling keyboard.
Pros
- Lots of power
- Excellent battery life
- Solid 16-inch IPS screen
Cons
- Spongier feeling keyboard
- Competition comes with an even stronger OLED screen
Key Features
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Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU The Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) features Intel's latest and most powerful Arrow Lake H chip, complete with 16 cores and 16 threads.
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16-inch QHD+ screen It also benefits from a larger IPS screen, complete with solid levels of detail.
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99Whr battery The Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) also has a huge battery inside, which can allow it to last for two working days on a charge with ease.
Introduction
The MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) has a powerful chip inside that makes it one of the beefiest ultrabooks you can buy today.
It’s being offered with Intel’s new Arrow Lake-H chips, with this specific model packing in the most powerful of the lot, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, for maximum oomph. Alongside this, it comes with a big 16-inch QHD+ IPS display, a huge 99Whr battery 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for a laptop that’s easily one of the most feature-packed available in its price class.
With the spec sheet on offer, this laptop takes the fight to the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024), Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 and Apple MacBook Pro M4 as one of the most potent laptops for creatives out there.
I’ve been testing the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) for the last couple of weeks to see just how well it performs, and whether it’s one of the best laptops we’ve tested.
Design and Keyboard
- Blend of gaming and ultrabook styling
- Weaker port selection
- Solid keyboard and trackpad
The Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) carries a certain MacBook Pro quality to it with its grey chassis which feels solid and is also reasonably lightweight at 1.5kg for a 16-inch laptop.
Despite the larger size, it makes this laptop quite portable while coming with a look to it that also gives off more of a gaming laptop vibe than a sleeker ultrabook. It’s a bit of a chunkier frame, although there hasn’t been much of a sacrifice with the overall slenderness here, given the position of the ports.
The Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025)’s ports are mostly contained on the back, similar to a lot of MSI’s gaming laptop, and it’s a pretty good selection.
You get a pair of USB4-capable Type-C ports with support for power delivery and display out, one of which is used for charging, as well as a singular USB-A and full-size HDMI port. The right side also houses Ethernet, an SD card reader and a headphone jack. I would have liked a second USB-A, but maybe that’s me being picky.
As a bigger laptop, there is a full-size keyboard of sorts here with a function row, arrow keys and number pad. Unlike the Prestige A16 AI+, the space for the keyboard tray has been utilised a lot better so the number pad isn’t especially cramped on the right hand side.
It’s a comfortable keyboard to use, being scissor-actuated, although the keys themselves feel a tad on the mushier side at times, and the white backlighting, while pleasant, is quite quick to turn off by default.
The trackpad here is virtually the same area as my 16-inch MacBook Pro, and offers snappy actuation with solid tracking. It’s a generally decent one, and also one that isn’t too loud with its clicking action.
Display and Sound
- Generally decent IPS screen
- Gets quite bright, with good colours and contrast
- Speakers are just okay
With a laptop at this higher end of the market, I’d have perhaps expected MSI to bundle in an OLED screen into the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025), but alas, it wasn’t to be. Nonetheless, it still comes with a large 16-inch IPS screen with a 2560×1600, or QHD+, resolution to provide solid detail across a larger area. It is only 60Hz though, so you miss out on the crisper and smoother motion experienced on higher refresh rate screens.
With this in mind, it’s still a good panel in terms of overall colour accuracy, with perfect coverage of the mainstream sRGB gamut and excellent results for more specialist colour spaces, too. It hits 97% of DCI-P3 and 85% of Adobe RGB. That makes the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) suitable for both productivity and colour-sensitive tasks.
A peak SDR brightness of 413.3 nits is also decent, while the 1990:1 contrast ratio is solid for an IPS screen, lending the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) to have good vividity and dynamic range. A black level of 0.11 means blacks are quite deep, as well.
The speakers here are reasonable, offering good volume and depth, although lack some bass and detail. They’re adequate for casual listening, although nothing special.
Performance
- Intel’s fastest Arrow Lake H chip inside
- Lots of power against comparable AMD and Apple options
- Speedy RAM and SSD inside
The headline inclusion with the new Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) is the presence of Intel’s flagship Core Ultra 9 285H chip, the most powerful Arrow Lake H-series chip available. It comes with 16 cores and 16 threads, with the core arrangement split between six Performance cores, 8 Efficiency Cores and two Low-Power Efficiency cores. There is also a boost clock of up 5.4GHz, making this quite the brisk chip for a laptop.
With this in mind, it’s going up against the likes of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365, as found in MSI’s own Prestige A16 AI+, as well as the M4 chip found in the base MacBook Pro. In our benchmarks, the Core Ultra 9 285H and Ryzen AI 9 365 trade blows, with Intel’s chip sitting approximately 2% slower in Geekbench 6 single-core, but pulls ahead by 7% in Cinebench R23.
Against the M4, the Core Ultra 9 285H is down on single-core performance in Geekbench 6 by 26%, but maintains parity in Cinebench R23 with a virtually identical score.
| MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) | MSI Prestige A16 AI+ | Apple MacBook Pro M4 | |
| Geekbench 6 Single Core | 2793 | 2842 | 3767 |
| Geekbench 6 Multi Core | 16570 | 14015 | 14955 |
| Cinebench R23 Single Core | 2148 | 1999 | 2187 |
| Cinebench R23 Multi Core | 15814 | 16584 | 13830 |
As for multi-core performance, the Core Ultra 9 285H pulls ahead in Geekbench 6 by 18% against the Ryzen 9 AI 365, and just under 11% against the M4.
With all this in mind, the bottom line is that the Core Ultra 9 285H is a seriously powerful chip that puts the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) almost into desktop power levels with its results here. It’s also especially snappy in real world use, helping the laptop to feel potent for everything from productivity to creative workloads.
The Core Ultra 9 285H features a beefed up iGPU against the 140V that we’ve seen a range of Intel’s newer Core Ultra 200V laptop chips in a range of ultrabooks, which benefits from slightly beefier performance in some games.
At 1080p, Rainbow Six Extraction managed 50fps, while Returnal stood at 29fps, and Cyberpunk 2077 without any ray-tracing or upscaling hit 23.03fps. They’re certainly playable rates, especially considering they were at native resolution and the highest graphical preset.
Going up to 1440p does put a dent into the averages, as expected. Rainbow Six Extraction served up a 30fps average here, with Returnal dropping to 21fps and Cyberpunk 2077 sitting at 14.70fps. The addition of XeSS 1.3 on its Quality preset pushed results up to 21.35fps at the laptop’s native QHD+ resolution, and even above 30fps at 1080p.
Ray-traced games, at least on max settings, isn’t necessarily something the Arc 140T is built for though, coming with a sub 10fps average in Cyberpunk 2077 with the RT: Ultra preset applied at native 1080p. If you don’t mind upscaling with Xess 1.3 Quality, you can get it up to 17.9fps.
The Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) also has 32GB of fast DDR5-7500 RAM, giving you plenty of speed and capacity for intensive workloads, while the 1TB inside gives you decent capacity. It’s also one of the brisker SSDs I’ve tested, with fantastic respective read and write speeds of 6983.26MB/s and 5762.00MB/s.
Software
- Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
- Comes with Microsoft’s AI smarts
- MSI’s own software options are also quite limited
The Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) features full-fat Windows 11, with a reasonably clean install. The only annoyance here is the presence of Norton Antivirus, which comes with a barrage of popups in the bottom corner without any real means of turning it off, apart from uninstalling the app.
Otherwise, there is also some specific MSI stuff here, too. It comes installed with MSI Center S, which is a catch-all app where you can do everything from checking on your system’s vitals and fiddle with settings such as the noise cancellation on the laptop’s built-in microphone and its performance mode.
This MSI laptop features all the AI smarts associated with Windows these days, including the dedicated wake key for Microsoft’s Copilot assistant on the bottom row. There are also AI smarts elsewhere, including in the Paint and Photos app for generating AI art based on prompts, adding filters to photos, or turning your art creations into varying styles, such as watercolour or an oil painting.
Intriguingly, this isn’t a Copilot+ PC though, as the Core Ultra 9 285H doesn’t have enough AI horsepower (or TOPS) to meet Microsoft’s minimum threshold. It’s intriguing that Intel has decided to do this, given the immense power that’s otherwise on offer, even against the Core Ultra 200V chips that are fully Copilot+ PC compatible.
Battery Life
- Lasted for 18 hours 48 minutes in the battery test
- Capable of lasting for two working days
The Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) comes with a huge 99Whr capacity, which is easily one of the largest batteries I’ve come across in any kind of laptop, let alone a productivity beast such as this one. As much as this is impressive on its own, it is worth remembering that a large battery isn’t a guarantee of longevity.
The fact that the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) has one of Intel’s newest chips inside means it’s quite efficient with its power, and helped along by that large battery, which means it was able to last for 18 hours and 48 minutes before conking out.
For such a powerful machine, that’s quite some endurance, being able to beat off a lot of the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus-powered competition, and even some of Intel’s own Lunar Lake-powered laptops including the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360.
It can also recharge rather briskly thanks to the bundled 100W USB-C charging brick, which took just 35 minutes to recharge from dead to 50%, while a full charge from zero took 90 minutes. That’s excellent.
Should you buy it?
You want lots of power
The Intel Core Ultra 9 285H chip inside the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) makes for one of the beefiest laptop chips available. If outright oomph is of paramount importance, you won’t get much more powerful than this.
You want more ports
The Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025)’s port selection is just okay, lacking some of the flexibility that the competition has with even more inputs.
Final Thoughts
The MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) impresses with its beefy power thanks to Intel’s top of the line Arrow Lake-H chip, as well as its fantastic battery life, lightweight chassis and solid display.
It’s little, but important, things that let it down against the competition such as its spongier feeling keyboard and backlghting that’s too quick to turn off.
The likes of the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) also benefit from an OLED screen for better dynamic range, black level and even stronger colour accuracy, as well as a higher refresh rate for smoother on-screen motion, as well as a smarter appearance. If outright power is what’s important though, then the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) is for you.
Trusted Score
How we test
Every laptop we review goes through a series of uniform checks designed to gauge key factors, including build quality, performance, screen quality and battery life.
These include formal synthetic benchmarks and scripted tests, plus a series of real-world checks, such as how well it runs popular apps.
- We used as our main laptop for at least a week.
- We test the performance via both benchmark tests and real-world use.
- We test the screen with a colorimeter and real-world use.
- We test the battery with a benchmark test and real-world use.
FAQs
The MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) weighs 1.5kg, making it quite light for a 16-inch laptop.
Test Data
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Full Specs
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