It's been 37 years since Huey Lewis and the News said it was hip to be square, but MSI thinks it's hip for a desktop replacement laptop to stick with a classic 15.6-inch, 16:9 aspect ratio screen instead of a trendy 16-inch 16:10 panel. The MSI Modern 15 (starts at $519; $999.99 as tested) won't win any awards for its almost-retro full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch display, but a beefy Intel Core i9 processor and 32GB of RAM make it a poor man's mobile workstation for number-crunching or demanding applications. However, it's short on luxuries, and its performance trails that of costlier Core i9 laptops.
Configurations and Design: Attention Costco Shoppers
You'll find a baker's dozen Modern 15 systems in MSI's stable—four with up-to-date 13th Gen Intel CPUs, seven with older Intel chips, and two with AMD Ryzens—all clad in Classic Black plastic except for one in Star Blue. The cheapest lists for $519 with a 12th Gen Core i3 and 8GB of RAM.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Our $999.99 Costco config (model B13M-010US) is the top of the line, a Windows 11 Home rig with a Core i9-13900H (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads), 32GB of memory, a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, and Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics backing the 1080p IPS screen. At this writing, it's discounted to $799.99 for Black Friday (through November 27, 2023).
Though its plastic construction doesn't inspire confidence—you'll find a bit of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck—the Modern 15 has passed MIL-STD 810G tests for travel hazards like shock and vibration. It's not compact, but fairly slim and trim at 0.78 by 14.1 by 9.5 inches and 4.18 pounds; a recently tested 15.6-inch gaming rig, the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF, is 0.82 by 14.2 by 10.7 inches and 5.25 pounds.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The screen bezels are thick on top and bottom (the latter with an MSI logo) and mid-size on the sides. You can open the screen 180 degrees flat, then press F12 to invert the display for a colleague sitting across your desk. The webcam doesn't have a sliding privacy shutter; the F6 key has a webcam icon but didn't seem to toggle the camera when I tried it as F5 does the microphone. The webcam doesn't support IR face recognition and you'll find no fingerprint reader here, so you're stuck typing passwords instead of using Windows Hello.
The laptop's left side holds two USB 3.2 ports, one Type-A and one Type-C, along with an audio jack, an HDMI monitor port, and the AC adapter connector. Two more USB-A ports join a microSD card slot on the right. You don't get a Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 port, but that's not a deal-breaker on an under-$1,000 laptop. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth handle wireless connections.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado) (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Using the MSI Modern 15: Not Looking So Good
We judge laptop screens on three criteria: brightness, resolution, and color and contrast. The Modern 15's falls short across the board—it's not really dim but barely bright enough at max backlight, keeping its colors from truly popping, and its 1080p resolution is adequate for routine tasks like word processing and web surfing but no longer competitive for image or video editing or content creation.
In its favor, white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy (helped by the ability to tilt the screen far back) and details are reasonably sharp with no pixelation around the edges of letters. But viewing angles are lackluster and colors are bland and muddy with little contrast.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The webcam could not have cost MSI much: Besides lacking face recognition, it has minimal 720p resolution, capturing blurry soft-focus images. Color is passable but everything looks dim in all but the sunniest rooms, and you'll notice a fair amount of noise or static.
Audio from the bottom-mounted speakers sounds decent but soft even at top volume; you'll hear no bass but you can make out overlapping tracks. Realtek Audio Console software offers about a dozen presets—Live and Club are okay; others like Pop and Rock considerably worse, either muffled or tinny. An equalizer is also included.
The backlit keyboard finds room for a numeric keypad at right; it's compressed, with narrower keys than the rest of the layout, but works fine. You can turn off Num Lock and use the pad's 7, 1, 9, and 3 keys as Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down respectively since MSI didn't include dedicated keys for those cursor functions—as with many laptops, you can also pair the Fn key and cursor arrows, but that's awkward since Fn is far right (under the right Shift key) unless you use the MSI Center software to swap it with the Windows key.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Typing feel manages to be shallow and mushy at the same time, like drumming your fingers on a tabletop, but fast typing is possible. The buttonless touchpad is decently sized but has a stiff, hollow click.
MSI Center consolidates useful functions such as system updates and recovery, performance versus cooling fan (noise) modes, hardware monitoring, and manual or AI-helped optimization or prioritization of favorite or creative apps. The rest of the software load is blessedly bloatware-free.
Testing the Modern 15: Fast, But Not the Fastest
Does its heavyweight CPU make the middleweight Modern 15 a contender? To find out, we pitted the MSI against two 15.6-inch competitors: The Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF is a gaming laptop that matches the MSI's price by pairing faster Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics with a slower Core i5 processor, while the HP Envy x360 15.6 is a convertible that costs $200 more, thanks to a spiffy OLED screen.
The other two comparison slots went to 16-inch machines also a step above the Modern in price. The Acer Swift Edge 16 is about $1,300 with a sharp OLED display and qualifies as an ultraportable at 2.73 pounds, while the Asus Vivobook Pro 16 is the most expensive in the group at around $1,400—and arguably the best equipped, featuring both a Core i9 CPU and GeForce RTX 4060 GPU.
Productivity Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
The MSI was speedy, to be sure but, apart from a sizzling score in PCMark's storage exercise, it didn't dominate as you might expect. It joined its rivals in soaring past the 4,000 points in PCMark 10's main benchmark that indicate excellent productivity for everyday apps, but its CPU results were more in the Intel Core i7 than Core i9 class. (Meanwhile, the Aorus laptop's Core i5 was an overachiever.)
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
Additionally, we run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
The Asus and Gigabyte's dedicated Nvidia GPUs embarrassed the other systems' integrated graphics. The Modern 15 is fine for solitaire gaming or video streaming, but don't expect it to play the latest console-quality titles. You might get away with streaming PC games over a service like Nvidia GeForce Now.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The MSI managed the second best battery life in the group, but its screen, like the Aorus 15's, is barely low-cost Chromebook quality with poor color coverage and clearly insufficient brightness. Not only OLED but mid-priced IPS panels are far superior. It's clear where MSI was focused with the Modern 15: raw CPU performance for as little as possible—niceties like a pleasant screen were not a priority.
Verdict: A Powerful Processor for a Pittance, But Not Much Else
Almost any laptop nowadays is fine for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, but a bargain-priced notebook with a Core i9 processor and 32GB of memory sounds like a boon for users of Adobe Photoshop or Premiere or other high-end applications. That's about all the MSI Modern 15 offers—its screen is a serious letdown, its integrated graphics can't keep up with its CPU performance, and that chip scored below most other Core i9 models in our benchmark tests. Whether you want all-around performance or just conveniences like a fingerprint reader and 1080p webcam, you would be smart to spend a few hundred more.