If your job revolves around photo and video editing, finding a laptop that can do it on the go is pretty hard. Mostly because not many laptops come with great quality color accurate displays. The MSI P65 Creator actually comes with a factory-calibrated color-accurate display, which is great for video editing and rendering. And that makes it the best laptop with i7 processor and the best laptop for editing purposes.
Why We Like It – MSI P65 Creator
The MSI P65 Creator might not be as “Ultra-Thin and Light” as MSI would like to advertise it as, but still, it’s an outstanding laptop for productivity purposes. The highlight here is the UHD display with an almost 100% sRGB wide color gamut. It’s perfect for photo editing and video editing, especially for color correction.
- 32GB dual-channel DDR4 memory
- Factory calibrated 4k display
- Both face recognition and fingerprint scanner for Windows Hello
- The cooling system is not up to par
Power & Performance
The MSI P65 Creator is a beast of a laptop with a great CPU and an excellent graphics card. And yeah, you heard that right, it’s a full-fat desktop-grade Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060, not a Max Q design. So you’re going to get the full performance of that RTX 2060. The six core i7-9750H is no slouch either. And the 32GB dual-channel DDR4 RAM is more than enough for running programs like Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci, etc. Check out the MSI Gf63 Thin 9Rcx 818 15 6 review for a laptop with a fast processor.
Battery
Battery life isn’t amazing, but it isn’t bad either. Obviously, you’re never going to get the kind of battery life MSI advertises. At best, you’ll get 6-7 hours of battery life out of it with average use. Even though this laptop isn’t geared towards the gaming laptop market, it possesses similar components to other gaming laptops. So this kind of battery performance should be expected. If you need better battery life, your only option is the Microsoft Surface Book 3.
Ports & Expandability
The MSI P65 Creator comes with a whopping four full-fat USB Type-A ports (one USB 2.0 and three USB 3.0). And there’s a type C port too, that also doubles as a thunderbolt 3 port. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support USB PD; in turn, it doesn’t support charging through it. And there are the usual ethernet, HDMI, headphone, and mic ports. An SD card slot is indeed missing. But we don’t think that’ll be too much of a problem as there are plenty of USB ports, and you can just buy a USB hub with an SD card slot. Still, if you really need an SD card reader, the HP Spectre x360 13t 2-in-1 convertible is a good option.
Build Quality
The build quality of the P65 Creator is surprisingly excellent. Everything from the hinge, the keyboard down to the trackpad feels premium and great to use. Unfortunately, the cooling system inside isn’t made the same way. It’s obnoxiously loud, and both the CPU and the graphics card throttle down due to heat more often than we would like to see. Even the cheaper ASUS ROG Zephyrus M that comes with the same processor, better GPU, and slimmer, is quieter than the P65 Creator. Be sure to take a look at the Panasonic Toughbook Cf-52Mk5 review for a rugged laptop.
Value
The price tag of the MSI P65 Creator at about $2500 is exorbitantly high. At that price, you can buy an M1 Macbook Pro and take advantage of a fast operating system like macOS and Final Cut Pro for video editing. But then again, it does offer an incredibly color-accurate display, durable build, fast 1TB NVME Optane ready SSD, 32 gigs of RAM, and a lot more. So counting every component, we think the price is justified.
MSI P65 Creator Wrap Up
Overall, the MSI P65 Creator is an excellent option for, well, creators. Just the display itself is going to be a Godsend for editors.
