MSI Modern 15 A11M in review: Slim office laptop offers strong keyboard backlighting

MSI has made the Modern 15 from an aluminum alloy that gives the laptop a high-quality impression. A MIL-STD-810G certificate is also meant to certify the reliability and longevity of the device. Gray and silver are offered as colors.

Furthermore, with a weight of just 1.6 kg, the Modern 15 A11M is the lightest laptop in our test field, and thanks to its small dimensions, it's also the slimmest and most compact device here.

The MSI Modern 15 offers a basic selection of ports that should be sufficient for most use cases. The Thunderbolt 4 connection also enables adding more ports with the corresponding adapters.

The SD card reader in the Modern 15 only supports cards in microSD format. Very good speeds are achieved with our reference memory card, the 128 GB AV PRO V60 microSD: 168.7 MB/s for copying data and 171.3 MB/s for reading data.

With our Netgear Nighthawk AX12 reference router, the Wi-Fi 6 module in the MSI laptop achieves good average rates of 1,159 Mb/s for transmitting data and 1,216 Mb/s for receiving data. This puts the office laptop on par with the competition.

MSI has only included a low-resolution 0.9 MP webcam, which delivers an accordingly mediocre image quality.

MSI grants a 24-month warranty period for the MSI Modern 15 A11M.

Keyboard

The keys of the Modern 15 are comfortably large and offer a good pressure point. This makes typing tasks easy, and even special keys like Del and Ins as well as the scroll keys can be accessed without difficulty. The arrow keys were also designed in the same size as the rest of the keyboard. Furthermore, the three-stage backlight is very good, ensuring a uniform and unobtrusive illumination of the key labels.

With the Modern 15 A11M, MSI targets mobile office users who are looking for a 15-inch laptop for daily use. The only differences between the available models are the color and the built-in RAM, which is either 8 GB (single-channel) or 16 GB (dual-channel).

The Intel Core i7-1165G7 installed here is a quad-core processor from Intel's Tiger Lake generation that can process up to eight tasks simultaneously. Its clock rates are between 2.8 and 4.7 GHz, with the actual performance also depending on the cooling system and the configured TDP. The latter has a generous setting with a PL1 of 45 watts and a PL2 of 64 watts.

The i7-1165G7 achieves a very good single-core result in our benchmarks, and it's only pushed into second place by the AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 4650U in multi-core applications. In the endurance stress test, MSI's laptop can place itself ahead of the ThinkPad E15 Gen 2, which is also equipped with an Intel Core i7-1165G7.

The MSI Modern 15 achieves a result that is slightly below the average of other laptops with this configuration in the PCMark 10 benchmark for evaluating system performance. The Productivity score is particularly noticeable here, as it's clearly below the scores of the remaining models in our test field. Nevertheless, it achieves second place behind the Lenovo ThinkPad E15 Gen 2 in the overall rating.

How other laptops performed in comparison is listed in our CPU Benchmarks article.

The 512 GB SSD from Kensington installed here achieves good read and write speeds. However, the comparison with our test field shows that these are slightly slower than those of the competitors that we chose.

The performance offered by other storage drives can be found in our HDD/SSD Benchmarks article.

The internal Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 graphics unit is responsible for displaying image content in the MSI Modern 15 A11M. It shares RAM with the CPU and benefits from memory running in a dual-channel configuration. Since the 8 GB of RAM used here only operates in single-channel mode, the benchmark results are comparatively low. The Lenovo ThinkPad E15 Gen 2, which uses 16 GB of RAM in dual-channel mode, is an example of what's possible.

Our GPU Benchmarks article shows the performance that can be expected from other graphics cards.

The graphics unit used in the Modern 15 is able to smoothly run older games or games with low graphics performance requirements. However, medium to low graphics levels have to be prioritized in order to get stable frame rates. Once again, the laptop would achieve a slightly better result here if its RAM was in a dual-channel configuration.

The performance that can be expected in different titles is listed in our GPU Games article.

During our endurance stress test, the temperatures inside the Modern 15 A11M rose to up to 91 °C (~196 °F). At the same time, the clock rates dropped below the base clock speed and could be stabilized by the system to an average value of around 2 GHz. The temperatures quickly dropped again after the end of the test, and the system remained completely functional. Therefore, no restrictions due to excessively high temperatures have to be expected.

The speakers in the MSI Modern 15 A11M offer a medium volume and a sound spectrum characterized by higher tones. This allows for a good reproduction of speech content in quiet environments, but external speakers or headphones are recommended for music or the like.

According to our measurements, MSI's office laptop shows a power consumption of up to 54 watts under load. While this value is rather low compared to our test field, the average idle power consumption of 11 watts is higher than that of the competition.

The included charger offers an output of 65 watts and has therefore a sufficiently high capacity.