MSI’s Modern 14 laptops were announced at the beginning of this year. The Laptops were powered with Intel’s Comet Lake based processor with NVIDIA discrete graphics. However, MSI is all set now to revitalize the laptops with AMD’s 7nm mobile Ryzen 4000-series (codename Renoir) APUs. Right now the brand hasn’t confirmed the devices that will be powered by AMD’s Ryzen 4000-series. The information was confirmed by the hardware informant @_rogame as he spotted the product page on the official website of MSI.
The AMD-powered Modern 14 laptops will have the equivalent Intel counterparts for the hardware components. The newer laptops that will be powered with AMD are labeled with the B4M designation. On the other hand, the Intel-powered models have a B10R suffix.
MSI Modern 14 Laptops Specifications
The Modern 14 laptop’s weight is 1.3kg and dimensions are 319 x 220.2 x 16.9mm. The laptop is available in two colors which are Onyx Black and Bluestone with an aluminum chassis. The laptop’s screens offer a comfortable experience that has a screen-to-body ratio closed to 90% and very thin bezels. The interesting part is still the laptop features an HD webcam (30 FPS @ 720p) on the top.
The screen has an FHD (1920 x 1080) resolution and is a 14-inch IPS-level panel. The refresh rate is not confirmed at this point. The laptop features an ergonomic keyboard with white backlighting enabling the users to work in darker environments. AMD’s Ryzen 5 4500 U and Ryzen 7 4700U are featured on the Modern 14 laptops. The Ryzen 5 4500U is a 6-core, 6-thread chip having the base and boost-up frequencies of 2.3 GHz and 4GHz respectively. On the other hand, Ryzen 7 4700U is an 8-core, 6-thread chip having the base and boost-up frequencies of 2 GHz and 4.1 GHz respectively.
The previous Modern 14 laptops were powered with Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake U-series processors and Nvidia’s discrete graphics GeForce MX350 or MX330. The newer Modern 14 models that feature Ryzen 4000 has integrated graphics with decent power. The Ryzen 7 4700U comes with seven Vega Compute Units at 1600 MHz and the Ryzen 5 4500U comes with six Vega Compute Units at 1,500 MHz.
Connectivity ports
The Intel-powered Modern 14 Models has one slot with support for DDR4-2666 modules with a maximum of 32GB. The AMD models have done many adjustments concerning the slots one of them being the DDR4 SO-DIMM memory slots. They come with two slots with support for DDR4-3200 modules and a maximum of 64GB. The laptops feature only one M.2 PCIe 3.0 slot for storage which is compatible with both PCIe-and SATA-based drives. The higher variant will have Wi-Fi 6 with Bluetooth 5.1 for Internet connectivity. The lower variants will have Wi-Fi 5 with Bluetooth 5.
Modern 14 Laptops have enough ports for connectivity. It features one HDMI port (4K @ 30 Hz), two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, and one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port. For Audio, it has a microphone and headphone-out 3.5mm combo jack and 2W speakers. The laptops have an integrated microSD card reader as well.
Coming to power usage, the Modern 14 has a triple-cell 52 Wh Li-Polymer battery. Both the Ryzen APUs that are featured on the device are 15W APUs so power usage is not a big concern. It has up to 10 hours of on-the-go battery life. For charging it has a standard 65W power adapter.
MSI’s authorized Build-To-Order (BTO) dealer named HIDevolution has listed the Moden 14 laptops. The pricing is also confirmed being $649 for the lower variant Ryzen 5 4500U model with 8GB of DDR4-2666, 256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD, and $749 for the Ryzen 7 4700U which shares the same base specifications. We can expect the laptops to arrive in market in early June.