MSI Creator 15 – Review 2020

MSI’s aptly named Creator 15 (starts at $1,499; $1,999 as tested) is designed for creative work, such as photo and video editing. Our test laptop‘s eight-core Intel Core i7 processor and XXL-size battery distinguish it by delivering excellent performance and almost 10 hours of unplugged life. Although a few items keep it from earning our Editors’ Choice award (including a hot-running chassis and some keyboard quibbles), we recommend it over the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15 for its superior feature set. It’s also a good alternative to the Razer Blade 15 Base Model, which doesn’t offer as much performance for the money.

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More Than a Jazzed-Up Gaming Notebook

The Creator 15 is closely related to MSI’s GS66 Stealth. It swaps that gaming model’s high-refresh display for a touch-enabled one; changes out the RGB-rainbow keyboard backlighting for white-only lights; and goes with a gray, instead of a black, chassis. There are also software differences that I’ll cover later.

The Creator 15’s handsome gray exterior is all metal and well-constructed. I like that the lid can be opened to 180 degrees flat, a potentially useful position given its touch-input display.

At 0.72 by 14.1 by 9.8 inches (HWD), this laptop is wholly portable for one packing a 15.6-inch screen. MSI lists its weight at 4.63 pounds, though it registered at a still-acceptable 5 pounds on my scale.

My test unit’s full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screen checks all the important boxes for creative work. Its slick display surface produces a clear picture and, surprisingly, lacks the distracting reflections of some glossy screens. Its hinges are properly stiff to minimize wobble for touch use, yet they still allow one-handed lid opening.

Good color coverage (MSI rates this panel for 72 percent of NTSC gamut, or close to 100 percent of the more commonly referenced sRGB) and ample brightness seal the deal.

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The Keyboard: Usable, But Imperfect

Comfortably sized keys and two levels of white backlighting are the highlights for the Creator 15’s island-style keyboard. A shallow 1.5mm of key travel makes it easy to type quickly, but the tactile feedback is minimal.

This keyboard’s layout problems stem from its origins on MSI gaming notebooks. The wider-than-normal left Ctrl key forces the Function (Fn) key to the right of the spacebar, making Fn-key combos especially difficult. Swapping the Fn key with the Windows key in the MSI Creator Center app trades one problem for another by making Windows-key usage equally difficult. I also dislike the undersize right Ctrl key.

The Creator Center app is specific to MSI’s Creator notebooks. Its headline feature is its ability to prioritize the performance of creative apps by allocating computing resources as needed. I can’t speak to its effectiveness since I didn’t have a test scenario relevant to one of the modes.

The app also provides a silent mode for the cooling fans and a setting that limits battery charge to preserve the battery’s health, a useful feature for a notebook that is usually plugged in.

Back in the physical realm, an extra-wide buttonless touchpad is perhaps the Creator 15’s most eye-catching feature.

From quiet physical clicks (accomplished by pressing down on the pad) to a slick surface, it nails the fundamentals. Its excess width could be useful for tracking wide in apps like Photoshop, though I didn’t realize a benefit for day-to-day usage.

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So-So Connectivity, But Good Biometrics

The Creator 15 has Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 connectivity courtesy of its Intel AX201 wireless card; I had no trouble getting either signal through walls in my house. Meanwhile, it gets at least one thing right about physical connectivity: variety. Thunderbolt 3 (on a USB Type-C connector), full-size HDMI 2.0, and a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port grace its left; an audio combo jack (headphone/microphone), a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, a full-size SD card reader, and Ethernet its right.

What it doesn’t get right is quantity. Including just one USB Type-A port is shortsighted. The other practical issue is that, since most of the ports are located forward (toward the user) of the midpoint on each edge, plugged-in devices tend to jut out and intrude on external-mouse territory or elbow-resting space.

The Creator 15 does better with biometrics by offering both an infrared webcam and a fingerprint reader. The cam’s 720p video quality is only passable, but it’s comparable to other notebook PCs in this price range.

Good speakers are another plus for this laptop. Located on either side of the palm rest, they have full sound and project nicely.

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Powerful Parts for the Money: The Creator 15’s Configurations

Under the hood of my $1,999 Creator 15 model A10SFT-053US is an eight-core/16-thread Intel Core i7-10875H processor (2.3GHz base; up to 5.1GHz boost), an 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (Max-Q) GPU, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB solid-state drive loaded with Windows 10 Pro. MSI includes just a one-year warranty, albeit with international coverage.

All told, it’s powerful hardware for the money. Most notebooks in this price range include just a six-core/12-thread Core i7 chip, like the Razer Blade 15 Base Edition; the $2,299 it commands similarly equipped is a hefty premium for its admittedly gorgeous OLED 4K/UHD touch display. Meanwhile, the Creator 15 is a downright bargain next to the $2,749 non-touch HP ZBook 15 Create G7, though HP’s standard warranty is three years.

The Creator 15 can be had for less dosh in its $1,499 A10SE-421 model; it downgrades to a six-core/12-thread Core i7 processor, a non-touch display, and a 6GB GeForce RTX 2060, while, strangely, doubling the solid-state storage (to 1TB).

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Testing the Creator 15: Eight Cores Bring Muscle

For our benchmark tests, I compared the Creator 15 to the following notebooks whose basic specifications are listed below.

This is a heavy-lifting crowd. The Dell Precision 7540 is a business-grade workstation rather than a creative-focused machine; I included both it and the Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition to demonstrate what their Quadro graphics cards can do in our workstation tests. Last, the Aorus 15G gaming notebook is here as a performance sanity check; it shares the same processor as the Creator 15.

Storage, Media, and CPU Tests

The Creator 15 was strong out of the gate with an impressive 6,181-point score in PCMark 10, our system-performance assessment that simulates real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We look for at least 4,000 points in that test, so this is a top-grade showing. Meanwhile, it matched the others in our PCMark 8 storage drive benchmark.

A pair of CPU-crunching tests come next: Cinebench R15 stresses all available processor cores and threads while rendering a complex image, and in our Handbrake test, we transcode a 12-minute 4K video down to 1080p.

The Creator 15 mostly kept up with the Aorus 15G despite being a little off the pace in Cinebench R15. The six-core Core i7 chips in the Asus and the Razer kept them out of the running.

We also use POV-Ray 3.7 to assess processor performance in creative notebooks. Its built-in benchmark ray-traces a three-dimensional image using only the processor, not the graphics card.

The six-core Asus showed some spunk, but the Creator 15 was close enough to the faster Dell.

The Creator 15 also performed sensibly in our last test in this section: photo editing. We use an early 2018 release of Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud to apply 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG image, timing each operation and adding up the totals. This test is not as CPU-focused as Cinebench or Handbrake, bringing the performance of the storage subsystem, memory, and GPU into play.

Workstation and Graphics Tests

Our first two benchmarks in this section measure the gaming performance potential of a PC. In UL’s 3DMark, we run the Sky Diver (lightweight, capable of running on integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, for high-end gaming PCs) tests, both DirectX 11-based. Unigine Corp.’s Superposition is the other; it uses a different rendering engine to produce a complex 3D scene.

The Creator 15 scored well in both benchmarks for a notebook with a GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q, predictably coming in just behind the Aorus 15G and its GeForce RTX 2070 Super Max-Q. The Quadro RTX 5000 used by the Dell and the Razer is based on the GeForce RTX 2080, which often performs similarly (as it does here) to the GeForce RTX 2070 in notebook form. Neither benchmark utilizes Quadro-specific features.

On the topic of gaming, I ran our gaming tests on the Creator 15 even though it’s not billed as a gaming machine. We use the built-in 1080p benchmarks in Far Cry 5 (at its Normal and Ultra presets) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (at its Medium and Very High presets). Far Cry 5 uses DirectX 11, while we flip Rise of the Tomb Raider to DirectX 12.

Performance isn’t what prevents the Creator 15 from being a great gaming notebook; its numbers far exceed the 60-frame-per-second average required for smooth gameplay. Rather, its 60Hz screen means it can’t deliver the ultra-smooth experience of the 144Hz or better screens that typically grace gaming notebooks with its kind of power.

Let’s move on to our workstation-focused Cinebench R15 OpenGL benchmark, which taps the hardware rendering capabilities of the GPU.

Though this is an older and mostly CPU-limited test, the Dell and Razer still finished ahead of the Creator 15 thanks to their OpenGL-optimized Quadros.

Our next, and most workstation-savvy, benchmark is SPECviewperf 13, which renders and rotates wireframe models using real-world viewsets from popular ISV apps.

The Creator 15’s numbers imply that it can power these apps to a limited degree, but its GeForce hardware isn’t optimized for them. The Creo and SolidWorks numbers from the Dell and the Razer plainly illustrate this. But all hope isn’t lost; MSI offers Quadros in the Creator 15’s very same chassis in the form of the MSI WS66.

Battery Rundown Test

For our last benchmark, we measure a laptop’s unplugged runtime while playing a locally stored video with screen brightness at 50 percent and audio volume at 100 percent. We use the notebook’s energy-saving rather than balanced or other power profile, turn off Wi-Fi, and even disable keyboard backlighting to squeeze as much life as possible out of the system.

The 99-watt-hour battery stuffed into the Creator 15 is the largest that the TSA allows in carry-on flights. Six minutes shy of 10 hours is exemplary for a notebook in this class.

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In the Heat of the…Chassis: Thermals

The Creator 15 doesn’t quite master the thermal challenge of packing lots of power into a thin, metal chassis, however, as our FLIR One Pro imaging shows…

The center of the keyboard reached an alarming 129 degrees F, or about 20 degrees higher than I prefer to see. The underside of the notebook felt just as hot despite half of it being perforated for airflow.

The Creator 15’s three fans are audible while running demanding apps, but the overall noise level is no higher than it normally is for this class of notebook. Importantly, the fans are well-behaved for general tasks since they don’t constantly vary their RPMs. The Creator 15 can run silently at the expense of some performance by using the Creator Center app that I mentioned earlier.

A notebook that offers cooler temperatures and lower noise levels is the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15, though it comes at the price of performance, a webcam, and biometric features.

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A Creditable Creative Machine

MSI’s Creator 15 combines the right features to earn our general recommendation. These include a stylish-yet-professional design; up to an eight-core Intel Core i7 processor; a creative-friendly touch display; a standard IR camera, fingerprint reader, and Wi-Fi 6; and nearly 10 hours of battery life in our testing. That’s an impressive resume for any creative notebook.

Though its inclusion of just one USB Type-A port, and its hot-running chassis, keep it from our Editors’ Choice medal round, those downsides may be worth swallowing. The Creator 15 offers noticeably better performance than the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15 and the Razer Blade 15 Base Edition for the same or less money. Mind the heat, but put it on the short list.

MSI Creator 15 Specs

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