Review: MSI Creator Z17

By Mike O'Connor | 16 August 2022

MSI’s Creator Z17 may be aimed at creatives, but that’s not telling the whole story – this is a laptop equally at home with gaming as it is image and video editing, and with a number of notable improvements over its predecessor the Creator 17, it might just have MacBook Pro users jumping ship. Mike O’Connor takes a look.

Through a combination of design, performance and a certain cool-factor, Apple’s MacBook Pro series of laptops have become ubiquitous in the creative community. But they also have their limitations, the most obvious being their lack of upgradeability and a pretty high cost of entry.

This has opened the doors to upstarts like Taiwanese-company MSI, which has spent the last few years refining its products pitched at creatives, culminating in its latest laptop, the MSI Creator Z17.

The Z17 is a slick and professional looking laptop in the flesh.

For this review, MSI sent me the Creator Z17 base model which features a Core i7-12700H processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Ti, 32GB of DDR5-4800 RAM and a 2TB SSD. It retails for a not insignificant $5,499, while the maxed out model upgrades to a Core i9-12900H processor, 64GB of RAM, and the same 2TB SSD. The bad news is MSI tells us only the base model will be made available in Australia, although if demand is sufficient the brand will consider offering upgraded versions.

Build

Inside the slick packaging of the Creator Z17 you’ll find a laptop that is thinner, has a higher quality finish, a larger trackpad and a better feeling keyboard than its predecessor the Creator 17.

The CNC-milled aluminium chassis is solid, and although it’s not as portable as its sibling the Creator Z16 (which has a 16’ screen), it’s still a relatively compact package considering what the laptop brings when it comes to performance. The Z17 is available only in a Lunar Grey colour.

On the right side is a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, USB-A, and SD card slot.

On the exterior you’ll find a heap of ports, including most you’d need for video or photo work. On the right side is a full-size HDMI 2.1 port (missing on the Z16), USB-A, and SD card slot, while the left side is where the power port, two USB-C ports and 3.5mm combo jack are located alongside a small LED battery life indicator.

The only notable omission is an ethernet port, but it still offers more than the current MacBook Pro models or the Dell XPS 17.

A power port, two USB-C ports and 3.5mm combo jack are located alongside a small LED battery life indicator on the left side.

It's worth mentioning too that unlike Apple’s laptops, the RAM is expandable on the Z17 – kinda. While technically upgradeable, the two DDR5 RAM slots and the main M.2 slot are hidden so deeply inside the case that it’s all but inaccessible to most people.

According to MSI you have to remove the battery, detach the screen, extract the WiFi card, disconnect at least five different ribbon cables, and then unscrew and remove the motherboard to access them. I suggest leaving this to the pros or avoiding the upgrade altogether.

The screen

MSI uses plenty of buzzwords to describe the Creator Z17’s 16:10 format QHD+ (2,560 x 1,600) display, while also spruiking the fact the screen comes factory calibrated and offers 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 colour space. And while it is bright and colourful for an IPS panel, you may notice it’s not as impressive as an OLED display that we are beginning to see on many recent laptops. That said, the 165Hz refresh rate is very smooth.

Out-of-the-box and using the built-in MSI True Color app, you can select from several pre-defined colour space presets like sRGB, AdobeRGB, and Display P3, and calibrate the monitor in each of the three gamuts. This level of functionality is impressive for a laptop and comparable to many image-editing monitors.

That said, despite the good coverage of DCI-P3 and sRGB, the Z17 only offers 87% of AdobeRGB, which is something to keep in mind if you plan to use it for colour critical work in that gamut.

In addition, the Z17 is also the first 17-inch laptop to support an active pen. The included MSI pen comes with two tips (one fibre version for drawing and one plastic for writing), over 4,000 levels of pressure sensitivity, and it neatly mounts to the side of the laptop via a magnet – although frustratingly this blocks most of the ports on the left side.

The MSI Pen uses a magnet to clip to the left side of the Z17, but in doing so blocks all the ports.

The other downside is in the actual usability of the thing. While the Creator Z17’s screen does open a full 180 degrees, it doesn’t fold flat like a tablet. This means you also can’t put any pressure on the screen in this orientation without causing the body of the laptop to rock forward and back. In my view this makes the pen pretty useless unless you really like to use it against the screen in its more traditional layout, or somehow prop up the back of the screen.

Performance

The MSI Creator Z17 uses the 14-core (six Performance and eight Efficient), 45-watt Intel 12th-gen Core i7-12700H CPU, and performance is very impressive. To test it, I imported 600 RAW files from an Olympus OM-1 into Lightroom Classic via the Z17’s SSD slot. These uncompressed RAW files weigh in at about 17MB each, and imported in a little over two minutes. In Lightroom, performance is also snappy as you’d expect, with merges, panoramas and general editing performed with a minimum of fuss.

To test Photoshop performance, I used Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop benchmarking tool. I currently don’t have a comparable system to benchmark it against (my personal laptop is a relatively lowly M1 MacBook Pro from 2020), but from my research the overall score of 1162 is excellent for an off-the-shelf laptop. By comparison, the same test on a Mac M1 Max 64Gb 10 Core @ 2.4 GHZ scored 992.

Finally, MSI’s thermal design optimises processor performance, with three fans housing the world’s thinnest 0.2mm fan blades and a full five heat pipes meaning the system runs relatively quietly even under heavy load.

The takeaway from all this is the combination of Intel’s 12^th generation processor with DDR5 RAM and a powerful NVIDIA RTX GPU means there are few tasks the Creator Z17 won’t excel at.

The keyboard on the Z17 has a lovely feel and the trackpad is huge.

Battery life

If there’s to be one downside to all that power, it’s the err…power. Battery life on the Z17 is average at best, and it means you’ll need to keep that stonking great 240-watt power brick nearby. I found the 90mwh battery burned through about 25% of life in about an hour of every-day use, although there is a quick charge capability that’ll charge to almost 50 percent in under an hour if you need it. For processor-heavy tasks, you'll want to keep it plugged in.

Wrap-up

The MSI Creator Z17 is an excellent laptop that leverages the advantages of Intel’s 12^th generation processors to deliver impressive performance in a sleek package. It’s certainly no budget laptop, but for creatives who are serious about performance and aren’t bothered by the limitations of the display or the relatively poor battery life, it brings a lot to the table.

Is it enough to sway MacBook Pro diehards? Well, we all know that’s nigh on impossible, but after two weeks with the Z17 I’m starting to question my own loyalties – proof that this is a very compelling package indeed.