The fit and finish of the MSI Creator Z17 is excellent, putting it right up there with the best from Apple or Dell.
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As it stands, our recommendation would be to pick up the A12UGST-049 and then upgrade your RAM and/or storage yourself (more on that later). If MSI offered a 64GB version with a Core i7 and an RTX 3070Ti for $3,500, that would be a very tempting upgrade – some of the most impressive performance gains we've seen in this laptop are probably due to the DDR5-4800 RAM – but they do not. The additional performance that comes with a Core i9 processor or an RTX 3080/3080Ti simply isn't worth the extra $750 - $1,350 for most photo and video editors, and the fact that this laptop is so (relatively) thin and does not use a vapor chamber means it would probably struggle to cool these components anyhow. The model that MSI sent over is actually the model that I would recommend to most creatives: the one with a Core i7-12700H and an RTX 3070Ti. No matter which configuration you choose, you'll get a factory-calibrated 17.3-inch QHD+ Touchscreen LCD with a 165Hz refresh rate and approximately 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space:ġ7.3-inch QHD+ Touchscreen IPS LCD Display The base model features a Core i7-12700H and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Ti, 32GB of DDR5-4800 RAM and 1TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage for $3,250, while the maxed out model upgrades you to a Core i9-12900H, an RTX 3080Ti, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB of PCIe 4.0 storage for a much steeper $4,600. The MSI Creator Z17 comes in three different configurations depending on the CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage you'd like. It's lighter and thinner than the Creator 17, features a much friendlier and sleeker design and, most importantly, it's as fast or even faster than the equivalent MacBook Pro in many photo and video editing tasks.ĭesign, build and usability | Screen quality | Performance benchmarks | Conclusion
The 4K miniLED display made some of that worth it, but from a day-to-day use perspective, it was designed as a desktop replacement that spent most of its time in the studio.įor a 'creator' laptop to truly compete against the latest MacBook Pros, it needs to be powerful, well built, well designed, and efficient-that's a pretty high bar.Īs it turns out, the MSI Creator Z17 ticks most of those boxes. The trackpad was small, the keyboard was mushy, the whole laptop was quite thick, and the RAM was basically inaccessible unless you were willing to remove the entire motherboard. That was an impressively powerful laptop, but it was still using last year's 11th-gen CPUs and there were a few things about its design that left us wanting. You may remember the MSI Creator 17 (no Z) from our review earlier this year. In other words: a jack of all trades, master of all.
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Our first chance to test this theory comes in the form of MSI's Creator Z17: a computer that's targeted at creative types who want a PC laptop that doesn't skimp on performance, design, or build quality. In theory, this new architecture should give 12th-Gen Intel laptops a boost in both performance and battery life, potentially giving Apple's latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros a bit of competition for creators' hard-earned money.
Excellent design, powerful hardware, and solid display make the MSI Creator Z17 a compelling MacBook Pro alternative for creatives who don't want to jump on the Apple Silicon bandwagon.Įver since Intel debuted its 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs with a hybrid E (Efficiency) core + P (Performance) core architecture, we've been itching to get our hands on one.
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