The MSI Modern 15 A5M has a minimal sleek design with no unnecessary design elements and the whole aluminum finish in carbon gray color looks very elegant. Rugged design with certified MIL-STD- 810G which means it should do well against drops and bounce. It’s portable, lightweight which is only 1.6kg, so can be easily transported anywhere. The hinge can be opened with one hand, and no weird flex in the hinge. However, the whole metallic finish is a fingerprint magnet. For students and professionals, display and processor are the most important features.
Let’s talk about that, with 15.6” FHD resolution IPS panel 60Hz 45% NTSC Matte anti-glare coating, thin bezels. The display can be tilted to 180 degrees, as for the display quality it's a pretty good band. The colors of the display are pretty accurate, the contrast ratio is pretty good, viewing angles are wide even though it’s IPS panel and the blacks are something to notice which is good too while watching movies and shows. As for the brightness, it’s not the brightest panel but it’s fairly usable outdoors. Also, the matte coating is not very reflective which is also nice for auto usage. The bezels are fairly narrow and MSI has managed to put in a 720p webcam on the top with crystal clear resolution and video quality is good when not enough light.
Coming to performance MSI Modern 15 A5M has some pretty good specs, there’s the Ryzen 5 5500U processor which is a 7 nm chipset with 6 cores 12 threads. Up to 4 GHz clock speed and AMD Radeon GPU on board. Apart from that, there is 8GB DDR4 3200Mhz RAM which is not soldered, and an additional slot as well which can be expanded to 64 GB. When it comes to storage there is a 512GB NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 SSD and like RAM there’s an additional M2 slot for more storage.
Coming to real-world performance, we all know how good the RYZEN 5 is when it comes to overall performance as well as battery efficiency. For a work laptop, this laptop is pretty solid and consistent all around. Office work like opening a ton of tabs, slack open in the background, photo editing, video editing, work playlist on Spotify, model 15 handles all of that easily. For students and professionals, this laptop can handle more complex workflows and difficult tasks pretty well. The laptop comes with 2 years of warranty from the MSI company.
Moving in the thermal performance of laptops matters a lot and the MSI 15 comes with MSI’s cooler boost tech and the exhaust vents with 2 dedicated fans and 3 heat pipes. Normally it's cool and at room temp. But if an intense app is running in the background some heat below the screen and as well as the bottom vents can be felt. Apart from that, no heat can be felt on the keyboard or the palm rest which is good. As for the fan noise, it’s there but it will not annoy you much.
Talking about the software there is Windows 10 home on board and for pre-installed apps, there are some MSI apps like- MSI center pro app which lets you adjust system performance, charging profiles, etc.
The keyboard, it’s a triggered keyboard with a white LED backlight, 1.5 mm travel, and a full-sized inverted tro key layout and the keys are well spaced. Then there is the trackpad which is on the smaller side but it’s responsive and works well and a windows precision touchpad. Welcome supports on the right you get two USB ports and a micro SD slot, on the left you get the proprietary charging port, HDMI port which supports 4k 60HZ external displays. There is also a USB-C 3.2 Gen2 port, USB-A 3.2 Gen1 port, and a headphone mic combo chat. As for the battery, there is a 52-watt battery that’s rated to last 10 hours but practically it last’s 6/7 hrs. of battery life. The 65-watt charger is pretty fast though. Lastly, there are dual speakers on each side which are decent in quality but not very loud and there is no bass.
Overall, it’s a solid sleek laptop with a nice minimal design, the display looks pretty good and performance is top-notch. MSI 15 laptop is speedy, pretty good for gaming and hardworking processor makes its performance better for video editing, rendering, graphics designing works. It’s affordable, user-friendly and most importantly within the price range for students.
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