I have reviewed a fair number of laptops over the last few years and most of these have been gaming laptops that come with powerful hardware in really big, bulky packages with massive charging bricks and a back-breaking weight. So when MSI sent over the productivity-oriented MSI Modern 14 A10RB (Rs. 74,990) laptop to us, everything about it attracted me. I’ve used this laptop for everything I usually do on my own laptop, and some things I have never done on my laptop, and I think the Modern 14 is a solid, bang-for-buck offering from MSI. Let’s take a deeper look.

Starting off with the design, like I said, everything about this laptop is stunning. The silver-white colour, the aluminium body, the sleek design. All of it is perfect and extremely eye-catching. I’ll be honest with you, I usually prefer laptops in darker colors, but MSI has done a flawless job designing the Modern 14, to the point where I’m trying to find issues with the design just so I have something to talk about.

Speaking of things that I saw when I opened the lid, let’s take a look at this display. The Modern 14 packs in a 14-inch FullHD IPS display and it’s pretty nice. It’s not the brightest panel I’ve seen on a laptop, but it’s definitely more than bright enough, and sunlight visibility shouldn’t be a problem thanks to the matte finish on the screen that reduces glare considerably.

What I don’t really like about this laptop is the 16:9 aspect ratio of the screen. It just feels too wide for no reason, and is weird for me personally, since I consume a lot of written content on the web, and a taller screen is more helpful to my workflow than a wider one. Although, if you’re a content creator, a wider screen may or may not be more useful to you.

Alright, let’s talk about the performance. The MSI Modern 14 is no slouch on paper. The laptop packs in a 10th-gen Core i7-10510U processor paired with 8GB RAM, and a 500GB SSD. There’s also MX250 graphics here from Nvidia to help along with any GPU-heavy tasks. These are solid specs for a mid-range ultrabook-like laptop, and that shows in the kind of real world performance this laptop can push.

Obviously, the usual Chrome with around 15 tabs open, playing YouTube Music in the background kind of work is handled pretty easily by the laptop, but even with slightly more demanding tasks such as handling large photoshop files, the Modern 14 performs really well.

I didn’t test out games on the laptop, partly because this isn’t a gaming laptop, and partly because the kind of games you’d play on a laptop like this include CS:GO and PUBG Lite, and both those games will definitely run flawlessly on this hardware.

Keyboard and Trackpad

Of the many things I absolutely adore about this laptop, the keyboard has to be somewhere right on the top of the list. MSI has slapped on a Steelseries keyboard on the Modern 14 and it is great.

The Modern 14 A10RB also comes with a wide selection of ports and I/O options so you will probably not run out of connectivity choices for your peripherals. The laptop has an HDMI port with support for 4K@30FPS video out, 2x USB Type C ports, and 2x USB Type A ports. Plus, there’s an SD card reader here, because a lot of content creators, especially videographers and photographers do need that port to actually transfer data between their cameras and their laptop.

Personally, I mostly only found myself using the USB-A ports, and, on occasion, the SD card reader, but it’s great to know the other options are available if you need them.

For Audio, even though the MSI Modern 14 might look like it has speakers right up top, that’s a big fat lie. The speakers are actually on the bottom here which isn’t great.

Lastly, there’s the battery, and this is another thing where the MSI Modern 14 excels. The laptop comes with a 50Whr battery, which isn’t the biggest in the segment, but it does last long.

MSI says the laptop can last up to 10 hours on a charge, which, for someone like me, is great because I tend to move around a lot at work when I’m writing an article and carrying the charger around isn’t the best option most of the time.

As it is with almost everything, the Modern 14 also comes with its own set of pros and cons.

Pros:

Cons:

MSI Modern 14 A10RB: An Amazing Laptop with Minor Issues

Everything said and done, the MSI Modern 14 A10RB is a solid laptop for its asking price of Rs. 74,990. The laptop comes with an impressive design and build, and is very lightweight which makes portability easy. It also packs in pretty solid specs, including the latest 10th-gen Intel Core i7 processor, so it’s fairly future proof.