MSI Modern 14 F13MG review: An affordable workhorse without the bells and whistles

The MSI Modern 14 (F13MG) is a business-focused budget laptop, perfect for low-level or temporary workers. At £649, with a 13th-generation i5 chip, the Modern 14 is good value for money. There's no glamour here, the display isn't the best, and the design incorporates cheaper materials. But that isn't what it's built for. This is about reliability for the everyday worker.

MSI Modern 14 F13MG review: Design

The Modern 14's design is understated with little neat touches on the lid and around the keyboard. Our review unit is 'urban silver', a serious-looking granite color that fits its business appeal. The machine also comes in a much lighter shade, 'platinum gray', which looks more white.

Unfortunately, the build feels very plastic. You pay for what you get and in this case, you're getting a little flex in the lid and a cheap feel overall. We can commend MSI, however, for producing such a handsome machine under a budget, but arguably this is why it's so affordable.

Ironically, the only parts of the design that look a little poor are its most useful parts; the selection of ports is great, but the arrangement is a bit unsightly and bulky. An agreeable trade-off that you'll appreciate when connecting to multiple monitors.

MSI Modern 14 F13MG review: Display, keyboard, and trackpad

The Modern 14 has a 14in FHD display with 1920 x 1080 resolution. It is an IPS-level panel, so not an actual IPS, just an emulation of one. To the naked eye, it's a perfectly suitable machine for web browsing and various Workspace or 365 applications. Although, as its benchmark results attest, this isn't particularly high quality, nor is it good enough for photo editors or graphic designers. With our colorimeter, the Modern 14 showcased a peak brightness of 260.60 cd/m2 and 56.8% for gamut color coverage. Its Adobe scores were even lower.

The keyboard is attractive though; nice black keys with icons that have a pleasing glow with the backlighting. However, they are rather small keys that make speed typing a little difficult – particularly if you're not used to it. The Copilot button, for example, is very thin and wedged in next to the '\' key – we struggled not to hit both simultaneously.

Users will find the trackpad much better as it has plenty of scope for the curser and a nice click action – not heavy, just right. There is also ample space on either side of the trackpad for your palms.

MSI Modern 14 F13MG review: Specs and performance

Inside the MSI Modern 14 is an i5-335U chip featuring an integrated Iris Xe GPU. The latter has a max clock speed of 1.25GHz, so clearly capable of everyday tasks. It's also capable of housing 64GB of memory with 2 Slots DDR4-3200 – which is very ample.

In two weeks of use, we found the Modern 14 to be a very capable work machine, handling most tasks with very little lag and hardly any noise from its insides. This is backed by its Geekbench 6 scores of 1,667 for single core and 6379 for multithreaded performance. Both of these are OK at this price range, however, for a little more money, the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus can give you more in the way of multithreaded performance,

In our looped video battery test, the MSI Modern 14 managed to last for 6hrs and 48mins which is a little underwhelming. Thankfully this did not translate into real-world use as the machine generally made it through most workdays without needing a charge. Heavy workloads and intensive apps drain the battery faster, but you're not likely to be using this for anything super taxing.

Sound you need a top-up, the Modern 14 comes with an adorable little square 65W adapter. Which can take the battery from 0 to full in just under an hour. The laptop also takes charge while connected to a monitor, but the charging speed is considerably slower.

MSI Modern 14 F13MG review: Features

Perhaps the most appealing part of the Modern 14 is its array of ports. That's Type-A USB 3.2 slots, a micro SD card reader (always welcome), a HDMI port, and a Type-C with power delivery. The card reader always goes down well with ITPro reviews as we also need to quickly upload photos of the reviews we write. And having the choice to connect to one or more monitors, with different connection options, is a boon.

The HD webcam with its 30fps is fairly good, if not a little grainy. While the speakers are nice and crisp. What's more, you also have a 3.5mm headphone jack too. So there are multiple audio and visual options, which frankly seems like a luxury for a sub-£700 laptop.

MSI Modern 14 F13MG review: Is it worth it?

So, with those fantastic connectivity options, expansive trackpad, and solid performance, the MSI Modern 14 appears to be a laptop with great value for money. Perfect for small businesses that perhaps need laptops for low-level employees or something a temporary worker can use.

No one should be looking at this for the screen or for extensive workloads – it's not photo editing or running AI programs. However, it is an affordable machine that offers lots of ways to connect to external devices. And it's performance will frankly surprise you.

MSI Modern 14 F13MG specifications