Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is a video on the MSI vortex so this is that tiny cylindrical PC that appeared at CES and when I first saw it I thought I really need to get one in because it's super cool but it's also obviously inspired by the Mac Pro which is my daily driver except it's a PC and it's geared towards gamers both good things right so to begin this video I need to talk about why I like to use the Mac Pro it's actually one of the most overpriced pieces of technology out there I mean it has Pro oriented hardware in there ECC memory Intel Xeon chips and a pair of workstation graphics cards but it comes at a very steep cost and if you purchased it on launch date it was already expensive two and a half years later it's the same hardware but it's not any cheaper so right now it's comically overpriced but there are two features that kind of make it special or at least special enough for me to continue using it every day first is the form factor it's super small a full-size ATX case is maybe 50 60 liters something smaller like a micro ATX is around 40 litres and even the smallest ITX cases that can hold a full sized graphics card those are at least 10 to 12 litres and it's tough to cool a system that small the Mac Pro is 5 and 1/2 liters it's very small and properly cooled the other feature for me is silence see the Mac Pro on idle and even under a moderate load is essentially silent the fan is so quiet that you can't hear it when it's on I have to put my hand over it to check for airflow now most people don't care a lot about this stuff they don't care about case size or fan noise and for them the Mac Pro is a complete ripoff and I get it if you're chasing good performance for the money this is seriously one of the worst computers you can buy but if you want something powerful that's abnormally small and actually silent the Mac Pro is here to steal your money but now we have the MSI vortex slightly bigger than a Mac Pro but still super small at six and a half meters there is no workstation hardware inside and instead you have premium gaming components it comes in two variants both of them have SSDs and raid0 a hard drive a sky like 6700 K but one version has 16 gigs of RAM with a pair of GTX 960 s and the second version which is the review unit here has 32 gigs of ram and a pair of gtx 980 s this one is VR ready but they're both very expensive the design is pretty unique it's a plastic enclosure that feels really durable and it has RGB LEDs that you can control in software similar to the Mac Pro it has a turbine looking fan at the top and this is the one and only fan in the system four ports there are some audio ports up top four USB threes a pair of HDMI 1.4 s a pair of ethernet jacks and on the bottom we have some Thunderbolt 3s and mini display boards the vortex can do triple monitor surround and a six Queen setup if your cloning so the hardware combination that's inside this review unit has been benchmarked many times I'm not going to get into too many details but it's a desktop skylake i7 with a pair of desktop gtx 980 s running an SLI eight gigs of video ram it's going to crush games even at 4k but I am interested in the thermal performance and fan noise at the base clock speed of 4 gigahertz the CPU didn't throttle down when I was running a CPU benchmark the fans get loud but there's no throttling it's nicely cooled the CPU temperature was in the low 90s overclocking is super easy it's just a couple of clicks but when I'm running the max overclock of 4.6 gigahertz there was some throttling not a lot but it is noticeable the GTX 980 s when they're at max load they sit around 75 degrees also very respectable as for fan noise it's quiet when it's idling but it's not silent and I was kind of disappointed about this I know it shouldn't be it's hard to compare the thermal output between two different systems but I've been spoiled by thump AK Pro and I was hopeful but considering the amount of heat that comes out of a pair of GTX 980 s it's actually very impressive fan noise even onload isn't too bad and you can still comfortably play games with speakers the last thing I want to touch on is upgradability the RAM and all the storage drives are upgradeable they're not the easiest access but it is doable and you'll likely be able to upgrade the CPU to the next generation KB light chips but the graphics cards you can physically remove them and replace them but they use MXM and even if they do make next-gen Pascal versions of these they're going to be more expensive than regular desktop cards so keep that in mind okay here's the thing when I saw the vortex at CES I remember thinking was a really cool looking product and I was interested in it but I didn't think it'd be a strong performer I thought that MSI had just made this really cool-looking computer shut off to the world and was like hey we can make one of these tubes too I was very wrong they nailed it the performance is good as a full-size desktop PC and the thermal management is fantastic the thing that isn't fantastic is the price now it is a custom engineered product so something like this is kind of hard to gauge its value it's a fully custom engineered solution the casing the chassis the power supply the PCBs for the motherboard everything is completely custom so it can fit into this super tiny case if you're looking for a powerful gaming machine the size of a mac pro this is an awesome choice you just got to be ready to pay up a little bit that's the end of this video give me some thumbs we liked it subs we loved it it's been nice I'll see you guys next time