MSI is mostly known for gaming PCs stateside, but the Taiwanese firm occasionally markets ultraportable laptops for business use. One of the latest is the Summit E13 Flip Evo (starts at $1,599; $1,899 as tested), a stylish, compact 2-in-1 convertible that has its sights set on the class-leading Dell XPS 13 2-in-1. The E13 looks gorgeous in the white color scheme of our review unit (it’s also available in black), which is a little expensive but very well equipped with a speedy Intel Core i7 processor, 32GB of memory, and a 1TB solid-state drive. A few quirks keep it from excellence (or from stealing the Dell’s Editors’ Choice award), but it’s otherwise a compelling alternative.
Tent, Easel, or Tablet
Take a look, and you’ll see several different laptops in MSI’s non-gaming Summit series. But only the E13 Flip Evo is a convertible with a 360-degree screen hinge that lets you prop the device up like a tent or easel for presentations or fold the keyboard flat behind the display to use the latter as a tablet.
Lenovo’s Yoga notebooks pioneered the concept many years ago, but recently laptop vendors have gotten more creative with 2-in-1 designs. The XPS 2-in-1, for instance, adds a sleek chassis with multiple color options and snazzy fiberglass finishes. MSI takes a similar approach with the E13. It’s not a carbon copy of the Dell, but at first glance there are numerous similarities. The matte white exterior and keyboard deck are made of CNC-machined aluminum, same as the Dell, and the white version has similar silver accents highlighting the edges.
In an interesting twist, the black version of the E13 gets rose gold accents, not found on the black version of the XPS 13 2-in-1. Although we haven’t laid eyes on the black Summit, we’d probably opt for the white scheme of our review unit. It’s eye-catching without being flashy as a black-and-gold combination might be. If you’re worried about dirt and smudges, black would, of course, be a better choice.
MSI also borrows the clipped corners of the HP Spectre x360 13. The rear corners are angled slightly, evoking the shape of a diamond. The E13’s diagonals aren’t as pronounced as the HP’s, and they don’t include the Spectre’s handy power button and USB-C port. Corner-mounted ports and buttons solve numerous pesky problems, such as keeping the power cord out of the way and preventing you from accidentally turning the laptop off if you grasp its edge. The E13 actually avoids the latter problem by placing the power button at the top right of the keyboard, which is awkward to reach when you’ve got the laptop set up in tent mode with the keyboard facing away from you.
A 16:10 Screen Built for Work
Crack open the E13’s lid, and you’re confronted with a rather conventional layout. The screen measures the same 13.4 inches diagonally as the XPS 13 2-in-1’s, but is surrounded by substantially thicker black bezels, contributing to a slightly larger chassis (0.59 by 11.8 by 8.8 inches, versus 0.56 by 11.7 by 8.2 for the Dell). The MSI is also a bit heavier (3 versus 2.8 pounds).
The display also shares a 16:10 aspect ratio with the Dell’s. That gives you a slightly taller view than the more common 16:9 ratio of screens like the Spectre’s, which can be an advantage if you like to see as much as possible of a spreadsheet or web page. On the other hand, 16:9 screens are a bit better for watching widescreen videos and movies. The HP’s chassis is also wider and shorter (0.54 by 12.1 by 7.7 inches). The E13’s display quality is average for a premium ultraportable. With a rated brightness of 500 nits, the screen is easily viewable in the brightest of indoor lighting conditions, and 100% coverage of the sRGB spectrum means that color faithfulness is excellent. Still, the MSI lacks a few cutting-edge screen options, such as the ultra-high-contrast OLED panels available on the Spectre x360 13. Nor can you outfit an E13 with 1440p or 4K resolution. The sole display choice is a full HD (1,920-by-1,200-pixel) panel with a glossy finish and tried-and-true IPS technology to ensure that picture quality doesn’t degrade when you’re viewing from extreme angles.
The screen does have robust touch support. Over a few days of testing, I used both my fingertips and the included digital stylus to interact with Windows 10. The screen offers excellent palm rejection when you’re writing or drawing with the pen, and I appreciate that a battery-life indicator automatically appears when the pen is in use. (Its built-in battery can be recharged via the USB-C port.) The stylus offers 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and a 166-degree tilt angle. It’s got a ridge to prevent it from rolling off your desk and a magnet to secure it to the back of the laptop’s display, but I found its button to be awkwardly placed—I repeatedly triggered it by accident with my index finger or thumb.
A Comfortable Backlit Keyboard
With keys that are well-spaced, sturdy, and full-sized, typing on the Summit E13 Flip Evo is a pleasure. I actually preferred this keyboard to the magnetic key switches of the XPS 13 2-in-1, which are also sturdy but have uncomfortably short travel. The keyboard backlight has three intensity levels and automatically turns off after 10 seconds of inactivity.
The E13’s buttonless touchpad is adequate. Its sturdy glass surface makes for satisfyingly smooth cursor movements, although the touchpad assembly itself has significant give—the entire chassis moves a bit when you click. That isn’t to say that it feels flimsy, however. MSI points out that the E13 has passed multiple MIL-STD 810G tests for durability.
Video and image quality from the 720p webcam centered above the screen is also adequate. There’s noticeable noise in videos, even in brightly lit rooms. MSI includes a nifty camera kill switch mounted on the laptop’s left edge; flicking it cuts power to the webcam, protecting your privacy in a more elegant way than a physical sliding shutter. Videoconferencing sessions get a boost thanks to software-based noise cancellation and twin speakers powered by the Nahimic 3 audio driver.
The camera lacks IR sensors for Windows Hello face recognition, but a fingerprint reader in the palm rest lets you log into your Windows 10 account without typing a password. Along the left side of the Summit, you’ll find three USB ports. Two are oval USB4 Type-C connectors with Thunderbolt 4 capability, which also fit the included AC adapter. The third is a rectangular USB 3.2 Type-A port. Meanwhile, on the right edge are a third USB-C port (USB 3.2, not Thunderbolt), an audio jack, and a tray-loading SD card reader.
Overall, that’s an excellent port selection for such a compact laptop. An HDMI video output would be nice, but you can connect an external monitor using one of the USB-C ports and a DisplayPort adapter. Wireless connectivity comes from an Intel Wi-Fi 6E chipset, making the MSI one of the first laptops we’ve tested with this state-of-the-art networking standard. Not many routers support Wi-Fi 6E yet, but it’s backward-compatible with Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5. The chipset also supports Bluetooth 5.2.
MSI supports the E13 with a one-year limited warranty.
Up to 32GB of RAM, If You Need It
MSI offers relatively few configuration options for E13 customers stateside; besides choosing white or black, your only other decision comes down to how much memory and storage you want. Our $1,899 review unit is maxed out with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD, but most users will probably be satisfied with the $1,599 model that halves those amounts.
All configurations of the E13 come with a quad-core Intel Core i7-1185G7 “Tiger Lake” processor with Iris Xe integrated graphics. With base and boost clock speeds of 3.0GHz and 4.8GHz respectively, this chip should be able to handle pretty much any everyday computing task you throw at it. Interestingly, Windows 10 Pro reported that MSI had downshifted the chip to its battery-saving 12-watt speed of 1.2GHz, but I saw little negative impact on performance during my testing.
MSI is positioning the Summit E13 Flip Evo not only as a contender for well-heeled consumers who need a sleek, powerful convertible, but also businesses looking to refresh their corporate laptop fleets. As a result, I’ve provided performance comparisons from both the consumer and business 2-in-1 categories, adding the corporate-focused Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 and Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga to the abovementioned XPS 13 2-in-1 and Spectre x360 13. You can see the contenders’ basic specs in the table below. (Read more about how we test laptops.)
With similar CPUs and integrated graphics, overall performance is extremely consistent between the E13 and its competitors here, as you can see with the PCMark 10 benchmark that simulates different real-world productivity workflows to assess performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. All five laptops hover around the 5,000-point mark (we consider 4,000 points an indicator of excellent productivity). Their speedy SSDs were equally consistent in PCMark 8’s storage subtest.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. As with PCMark 10, all of the competitors posted roughly equal scores in this test.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video to a 1080p MP4 file (lower times are better). The MSI tied the HP for first place in this test, but the differences were small.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost. Results were predictably tight here.
For Basic Games Only
Thin and light convertibles shouldn’t be mistaken for gaming rigs, and the E13 is no exception. It slightly outperformed its rivals in our two 3DMark gaming simulations, Sky Diver (less challenging, suitable for integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, meant for gaming PCs), but the margins were small and none of the contenders scored particularly well. The Summit should be able to handle casual and browser-based games, but it’s sure to balk at top-end titles requiring an Nvidia or AMD discrete GPU.
Finally, the E13 showed a thoroughly competitive 14-plus hours of stamina in our battery rundown test, which involves playing a 720p video with Wi-Fi disabled and screen brightness and audio volume set to 50% and 100% respectively. The MSI outlasted both the XPS 13 2-in-1 and the Spectre x360 13, though any of these convertibles will get you through a full day of work or school.
An Attractive Productivity Partner
The MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo easily holds its own as an alternative to compact convertibles from Dell and HP. For the relatively high asking price, you get a thoughtfully designed ultraportable with plenty of computing power. Certain included extras could bring it to the top of your consideration list, such as the USB-A port, SD card reader, and bundled stylus. The 32GB of memory is also noteworthy, although most typical buyers won’t need it.
For others, those advantages won’t outweigh the E13’s few quirks, which include larger screen bezels and the lack of a 4K display option. Overall, the XPS 13 2-in-1 retains its Editors’ Choice bragging rights as the best premium 2-in-1, while the ThinkBook 14s Yoga is our top pick in the small-business convertible category. But this is a very credible first effort in its category, from a brand known mainly for making gamers happy.
