MSI Summit E16 Flip Evo

Delivers for speed, quality and battery life, so the only question is whether you need a 16in convertible

- TIM DANTON

PRICE £1,058 (£1,270 inc VAT) from laptopoutlet.co.uk

MSI may not be the first name you think of when it comes to laptops, but the Taiwanese company was quick to back Nvidia’s Studio scheme with a range of creative machines. Search online for the MSI Summit E16 Flip and that’s exactly what you’ll find, but this Evo variant is an all-Intel affair based around the 12th generation Core i7-1260P.

This means that Intel’s integrated Iris Xe graphics are in charge of 3D acceleration, so if you’re frequently pumping out 3D models in Blender then the Flip Evo is not for you. The Irix Xe is a solid chip that’s capable of 60fps in older games such as Dirt: Showdown and Metro: Last Light, at Full HD and High settings, but move to Dirt 5 and that drops to 15fps.

Intel’s CPU makes a bigger splash in mainstream applications, with 12 cores ready to attack. That showed itself in a fine 323 score in the PC Pro benchmarks and 11,972 in Cinebench R23’s multicore test. I will only add two caveats: if brute force is important to you then a chip with more than four P-cores will return even faster results, and our tests were in Performance mode. That involves fan noise, but you can prioritise silence using MSI’s Center Pro app.