We recently checked out the MSI Prestige 15 aimed at both office users and content creators who may need more power than your typical Ultrabook. While its 4K display and GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics proved to be brighter and faster than most other ultra-thin laptops, the brand new Comet Lake-U Core i7-10710U processor was a mixed bag when under 100 percent utilization.
To test this, we would run Prime95 to stress the CPU while observing clock rate and temperature behavior with HWiNFO. Our screenshot below shows that once the Prime95 stress test begins, clock rates would jump to 3.6 GHz for the first few seconds until hitting a core temperature of 92 C. Clock rates and temperature would then stabilize at ~3.2 GHz and ~94 C thereafter, respectively.
After about 4.5 minutes of Prime95 stress, however, clock rates and temperature would suddenly cycle between 800 MHz and 3.2 GHz and 67 C and 95 C, respectively. Power consumption during this time would also cycle between 37 W and 92 W to be in tandem with the clock rate and temperature cycling.
Strangely, we were unable to reproduce the results above when rerunning the same stress test on a second Prestige 15 unit. Clock rates and temperature would instead stabilize at 2.8 GHz and 95 C, respectively, as shown by the screenshot below compared to 2.8 GHz and 82 C on the ZenBook 15 UX534F.
There’s nothing inherently wrong about high core temperatures reaching over 90 C as Intel CPUs are designed to run as warm as 100 C to 105 C in most cases. Nonetheless, stabilizing at 95 C like on the Prestige 15 is undesirable since you are essentially walking a thin line between high performance and the potential for throttling. We recommend keeping a close eye on core temperature if you intend to run the MSI laptop at 100 percent CPU utilization. Thankfully, this shouldn’t be an issue if browsing, streaming, editing, or gaming.