The MSI Creator M16 (A12UE-631 as configured) is one of the latest laptops sporting the new Intel Core i7-12700H processor, which is about 30% faster compared to the previous-gen i7-11800H. While many of the features are targeted more toward creative professionals, it offers great specs, performance, and value—which make it a great laptop for general productivity and gaming as well. It's also one of the best choices for under $1600.

I've been testing the Creator M16 for a few weeks, using it for a mix of video, photo editing, and gaming; both as a desktop replacement and on the go. When compared to my main 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max, its benchmark results are impressive. It may not be as slim, efficient, or sleek, but its raw performance and value are hard to beat.

Overview

My $1499 review model is one of its mid-range configurations that comes with the i7-12700H, RTX 3050 Ti 4gb, 16gb RAM (2 x DDR4-3192), and a 512 GB NVMe (Micron 2450). Depending on your needs, budget, and where you purchase the laptop, there are several available configurations available with different RAM and SSD capacities. At the time of this review, Amazon appears to be the only retailer offering the MSI Creator M16 with the beefier RTX 3060 but a slightly less powerful Intel i7-12650H. It also comes with 32GB (16GBx2) DDR4 3200MHz and a 1TB NVMe and currently retails for $1,599.99.

The MSI M16 comes standard with a 16" 16:10 QHD+ (2560×1600) True Color panel with thin bezels that can flip 180° to lay flat. Compared to traditional 15.6 1920x1080 panels, you are getting more screen real estate in a similar footprint. The all-black design with its glossy black MSI dragon logo is rather bland and uncharacteristic but is a safe choice considering this laptop can be used by creators, gamers, business people, and more. Despite being an all-plastic build, the laptop is rather thick and heavy, at 1.08" and 4.97 lbs, which can be noticeable when taking this on the go. The benefits however include better build quality with less flex, better port selection with Gigabit LAN, full-size USB, and HDMI, as well as very effective thermal management with their Cooler Boost 5 Cooling system.

While there are other similarly specced laptops for around $1400-$1500, including the $1499 MSI Pulse GL66 with a 15.6" FHD 144Hz, Intel Core i7-12700H, RTX3060, 16GB RAM, and 512GB NVMe, the MSI M16 can be seen as one of the better choices for those who are willing to forego some gaming-focused features such a faster refresh rate, and prioritize a larger and more color-accurate display, in an overall sleeker, minimalist design.

Which Configuration Should You Choose?

The MSI M16 has two slots of memory which are both upgradeable. Storage is also upgradeable, however, there's only one NVMe PCIe Gen 4 slot, so any expansion means a full replacement of your main drive. Generally, with these types of laptops, it is cheaper to buy them future-proofed in the configuration you'll need, compared to upgrading them yourself.

It's also important to note again that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 6GB is only available with the Intel Core i7 12650h and is currently only offered through Amazon in a fully specced out configuration already (32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe). For many 3D applications, benchmarks, and gaming, the RTX3050ti will be about 30-40% slower compared to the RTX3060. Depending on how intensive your tasks are, that extra 2GB of VRAM can be crucial. There are certain tasks that might take advantage of the somewhat faster Core i7 12700h vs the i7 12650h, but overall, the tradeoff for getting the RTX 3060 is worth it. If you have the budget for it, or were already planning on choosing a configuration with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe, I would highly recommend choosing the RTX 3060 model.

16" "Golden Ratio" Display

One of the MSI Creator M16's biggest selling features is its display. MSI introduced the 16" 16:10 "golden ratio" (as MSI calls it) 2560×1600 QHD+ display to their lineup last year with the 11th Gen MSI Creator M16. The display is the same width as a traditional 15.6" display, but is 0.4" taller and gives you 11% more screen in a very similar form factor because of its thin bezels. It still manages to fit in a 720p webcam at the top, unlike some laptops which have completely ditched it.

I found the biggest advantage of this extra height was with creative apps like Premiere Pro where you can have a taller video timeline, and still have a relatively large playback preview area above it. Generally, on smaller laptop screens, everything can feel very squished and hard to use unless you close some of your tools. Especially when editing larger and more complicated sequences, this extra height was great. Other apps with large toolbars at the bottom like Blender and Cinema4D, as well as general multitasking are able to take advantage here too.

On the topic of editing, another reason advantage of this display is its color accuracy. MSI offers its True Color Technology which they claim displays 100% of sRGB color space. Hence, each color is delivered with the highest standard precision in detail, guaranteeing excellent color fidelity for many use applications". There are six color profile presets that you can switch between depending on the type of work you're doing, content you're watching, or games you're playing. For collaborating on color accurate projects, users can share or work from the same profiles to ensure that each display is representing the colors in the same way.

Being that this laptop is more targeted towards creators and not gaming, it's no surprise that it's "only" 60Hz. While the benefits of a faster panel are mostly seen with gaming, it can also make the laptop overall feel more fluid and smooth with other tasks like web browsing and anything involving motion. Going back to an earlier point, if you prioritize the extra screen real-estate as well as the more color-accurate panel, the lower 60Hz is a worthy tradeoff.

Benchmarks

With the current laptops I have on hand, I ran a few benchmarks with each of them which should highlight how impressive the MSI M16's performance is. Especially compared to the MacBook Pro 14, which costs nearly twice as much, this in no way is an apples-to-apples comparison, but these MSI M16 benchmark results can be compared directly with other online benchmarks running the same tests.

Intel has brought their A-game with the new Intel i7 12700H. With our first test running Cinebench R23, the Intel i7 12700H is about 18.6% faster than the M1 Max and 100.4% faster than the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS. Interestingly, when unplugging the MSI M16, even when changing its battery profile to max power, the laptop is significantly throttled by about 32%. I was unable to find a battery/power profile on the MSI M16 that would unleash its full performance while unplugged. In comparison, the MacBook Pro 14 and even the ROG G14 were within the margin of error of the same results while unplugged.

3DMark tests including Fire Strike and Time Spy are only available on Windows. Compared to the ASUS ROG G14 with the RTX 2060, we see it struggle in graphics but remain strong with its CPU results. While it's not intended for 4K gaming, you can comfortably play most modern games on Medium to High settings at 1080p, achieving over 60FPS. More demanding games that rely on VRAM will likely require settings to be dropped, however. That said, for a mixed-use laptop, for content creation and some gaming, this will get you by.

Next, we have a real-world five-minute-long 4K 23.976FPS video project exported from Premiere Pro. I used the YouTube 2160p 4K Ultra HD preset which targets 40 Mbps. With its previous benchmarks and overall very impressive CPU results, you might expect the MSI M16 to beat the MacBook Pro here as well. However, the MacBook Pro's M1 Max chip is still by far the better choice for video encoding and decoding, at nearly twice as fast. More importantly, the MacBook Pro is able to keep the same performance unplugged, rendering the video in almost two minutes, whereas the MSI M16 takes about four times as long, at about 16 min.

User Experience

Battery Life

MSI is using the same three-cell 53Wh battery from last year's M16 Creator laptops. Windows 11 estimates about 2 hours of battery life, but in my experience, with mixed tasks including web browsing and some video, you can expect 3-4 hours of battery life at 50% screen brightness.

This should be fine if you're taking notes in class or needing to work untethered for a few hours. Heavier workloads including anything GPU intensive will significantly drop battery life to less than two hours, and closer to one hour or less if it's a sustained GPU load like 3D modeling or exporting a video. On top of that, as we've shown with our benchmarks, the MSI M16, at least at the time of this review, is unable to give you the same performance unplugged, unlike the ROG G14 and the MacBook Pro.

Portability, Design and Build Quality

At almost 5 lbs (2.26kg), this is a relatively heavy laptop. For its size, 1.08" thick isn't too bad, but there are definitely thinner and lighter options out there. It can be quite noticeable when carrying MSI M16 around all day. The lid and bottom of the laptop look sleek and premium, especially with the honeycomb vents. The all-plastic build, however, while solid and nearly flex-free, feels rather cheap. The keyboard deck seems to be using a different plastic as it isn't as prone to fingerprints compared to the top lid, which was covered in them within seconds of me unboxing the laptop.

Keyboard & Trackpad

The MSI Creator M16 uses a full-size keyboard with 1.5mm of key travel. It's been good to type with and even use for gaming. With a few weeks of use, it has minimal fingerprints surprisingly. MSI is always known to have a good quality gaming-specific keyboard on all its product lines. The keyboard has a white backlight with three levels of brightness. MSI has reserved their cool RGB effects for their gaming series laptops, which I did miss.

The trackpad is just average. Scrolling and gestures were accurate. There is definitely room to fit in a larger trackpad, however. Built-in to the trackpad you'll find left and right-click buttons, which support clicking to about 80% of the height of the pad, but more so along the sides and not as much in the middle as I would like. At the top left of the trackpad, there is also a fingerprint sensor that supports faster log-in.

Thermal Management and Noise

The MSI M16 uses the same Cooler Boost 5 Cooling System from last year's model. It features a dedicated thermal solution for its CPU and GPU, each with four heat pipes. While I wasn't able to record my thermals or noise levels, I can say that the laptop was able to sustain high GPU and CPU tasks like an endless Cinebench loop for over an hour without running into thermal throttling. On the other hand, these fans love to kick in early, even with lighter tasks.

When gaming and other GPU tasks, the laptop gets quite loud and has me really appreciating my almost always silent MacBook Pro. While working with this laptop, I would highly suggest using a pair of headphones as that fan noise will get annoying for most.

MSI claims this their MSI Center controls allow this to be "The Cleverest Gaming Laptop Ever". It features Smart Auto which detects apps and system status to auto switch on suitable power modes. It also has Ambient Silent AI which supposedly detects the ambient noise and adjusts the fan speed so as not to be too loud.

In truth, it was a little difficult noticing these modes making much of a difference, especially when the system was being stressed. General tasks and web browsing saw some benefits, but I still found myself wanting it to stay quieter for longer.

Final Thoughts

For creative professionals, students, and others who want a relatively powerful laptop with excellent value and prioritize a larger and color-accurate screen, the MSI Creator M16 is a great choice. My recommendation, if your budget allows, would be to choose the RTX 3060 model, as you get even better performance and value from that configuration.