Gadgetory

everyone I am Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're talking about MSI's AG 270 a i/o system and all-in-one computer that's what we're looking at here today and in terms of core specs this effectively uses laptop components just mounted to a much larger display than you'd find in a laptop so it's got a 27-inch 10-point touchscreen display to the back of that is mounted the hardware and then we've got speakers in the front so you have some speaker capability obviously for something higher-end you'd want your own speakers but the idea of an all-in-one is to eliminate as much cable clutter and as many peripherals as possible this does include two peripherals the keyboard and mouse neither which is great talk about that momentarily and then it's got touchscreen if you really wanted to ditch standard peripherals but that's going a bit extreme especially because this is targeted at gaming and reinforcing its target to the gaming market is the gtx 980m eight gigabyte mobile GPU that's our GPU the cpu is an i7 4870 HQ which is a 2.5 gigahertz stock CPU obviously turbos to some extent that is one of Intel's newest CPUs fourth generation the system has 16 gigabytes of ddr3 1600 megahertz Ram pre-installed 1600 megahertz plenty for most gaming applications and then in terms of storage it's got 2 128 gigabyte Plextor m6m SSDs these are technically not branded in the advertising for the specs of the unit so they could change FM as I wanted to source a different SSD supply but that's what they are in here in terms of the m6m SSDs they are in a raid that they are striped so that means they're gonna work a bit faster than a single Drive and also it offers 240 gigabytes of usable space to the user so 128 times to 256 you subtract out over-provisioning and other overhead and then we're left with 240 usable space there is a hard drive a 2 terabyte Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm hard drive and Seagate not my favorite brand in the world they have a fairly high failure rate at certain ranges for consumer drives but in the case of this 2 terabyte drive it's ok we're okay with it being used in a system like this because just archival storage it's not going to as abused as your primary drives which the SSDs are better suited for part two of the specs would include the display so it's a 1920 by 1080 display 27 inches and is touchscreen enabled if you want to ditch the touchscreen capability unfortunately you also have the sacrifice that SSDs MSI has three versions of this unit available this one $2,700 they have about a $2,500 version which is probably slightly lower but you down the clock the skew of the the CPU to a slightly lower skew of Intel CPUs still perfectly fine for most gaming applications and then further below that is the $2,000 version which has no touchscreen so that saves you a lot of money but also no SSDs and that's a big hit to me as a gamer that's definitely something I want and a system at this point is SSDs especially in an all-in-one system and as an all-in-one it is meant for use in a living room environment in a common area environment and that means that you want SSDs because you want it to boot quickly be accessible and then sort of get it over with shut it down they're also a lot quieter at 2700 dollars it's a steep buy it's a little bit hard to swallow and as system builders we're used to paying a little bit less and getting more but this is not targeted at us as system builders it's targeted at users who want something that is fairly easy to deploy this is gonna be for people who are in a family environment where you just sort of deployed it in the living room and be done with it and it also eliminates cable clutter behind the system so that's a plus it's fairly quiet because it does use laptop components and that's sort of what you're looking at here and then of course aesthetics and cohesiveness of design not really my territory I don't like talking about those things so just take a look at it yourself decide for yourself if you like how it looks and I'm gonna stick with the objective items so we're talking and primarily about things like thermals gaming performance and we'll go from there in terms of thermals you can see here that the system has a fairly standard thermal design for laptops but it's been beefed up a little bit so we have three massive 10 millimeter heat pipes and that a smaller six or eight millimeters I'm not entirely sure which it is six or eight millimeters for the other heat pipe here the heat pipes as always are routed between the CPU the GPU and the aluminum plates where they're synced to the aluminum heat sinks where they dissipate the heat and the way a heat pipe works this is not news for this a IO is how they all work but just to recap it is they use a phase change to dissipate heat pretty rapidly so basically you've got copper heat pipes made entirely of copper and then they have a small channel in the middle where there is a sintered or a weave or a mesh a set of other metal normally copper also and there's liquid in there the liquid flows through the heat pipe and so at the end where the component is the CPU or the GPU the component heats it up that turns the liquid into a gas that's a phase change and when you go through any type of phase change liquid to a gas you're burning a lot of energy you lose a ton of energy in that phase change in this case we want to lose energy because energy is in the form of heat and that's dissipating the heat so it turns into a gas goes to the other end of the heat pipe and then condenses and turns back to liquid comes back down it's just capillary action if you're familiar with that that's how heat pipes work so that's the basics of a heat pipe once it gets to the end and begins condensing again that's where the heat sink is that's where the big aluminum or copper heat sinks it's dissipates the heat then that gets blown away by a fan and that's the end of the cycle so that's how a heat pipe works in terms of this design three ten millimeter pipes is pretty big that's about what some of the high-end video cards have and because this is a 27 inch display we're not constricted to the same confines that a laptop would present so we've got more space to spread out the components and MSI did just this they actually use a slightly larger more standard form factor motherboard rather than the traditional very cramped and sometimes custom laptop motherboards so this lets the CPU and GPU be distance further from each other which means that they all the heat isn't concentrated in one place so we can dissipate it more quickly thermals of the system as you see in this charge are actually very good they're definitely acceptable this is not a delta over ambient chart so it's absolute temperatures and to get Delta U just if you want to do it sort of in your head subtract 21 Celsius at all times from the chart that gives you the Delta but the important bit here is that whenever there's a big spike-like to 9dc which would be 70c subtracting ambiens you see a pretty quick cooldown it dissipates very quickly the CPU and GPU regulate themselves well they throttle when necessary and then the fans just spin up when necessary as well and that's sort of where the dissipation is going in terms of thermals I'm impressed with the AI oh definitely happy with thermal performance this chart shows the gaming performance of the AG 270 a IO as you can see pretty much expected for the 980m basically the same as our cyber power and origin laptop reviews where we worked with the 980m as well performance is very good for games you can play pretty much everything that high to ultra so that's always great and then some games like The Witcher 3 you definitely have to step it down a bit too high or medium for playable settings power draw is pretty minimal it only draws 230 watts from the AC drop to the wall there's no internal power supply so you're strictly plugging straight into a wall just like a laptop would but there's no battery so you're drawing 230 watts there under full load and really not that bad not much to complain about in that instance and one thing that is kind of cool is a paint program skinned by MSI and the paint program offers some fun with a touchscreen it's certainly not coral paint or Photoshop or any professional application where you would be doing something with tablet painting with a stylus but it is fun to play with and for a system that's probably targeted I like the family gamers that's okay it's okay to have something fun to play around with now that said that's really the whole experience of the touchscreen it's really not something I found to be practically useful because for extended periods of use holding your arms up like this is actually really difficult to tap a screen like this for more than a few minutes and I'm sure you can all leave your comments making find a weak nerd arms below but that's just the nature of the situation and it's not really the most accurate screen anyway it's not like there's pressure sensitivity for for really accurate artistic scenarios so if you're an artist it's still in your best interest to buy a proper artists tablet this is definitely a gaming system with a touchscreen thrown onto it so if the touchscreen is worth it to you that's up to you to me not a big feature draw i'd rather sacrifice the touchscreen reduced cost and keep the SSD so i want an in-between skew they included audio is decent you can see at least it looks like four speakers in the front right above the acrylic and there's not much bass so it's a bit tinny but it's loud and that actually does matter because with laptop components i've often had the issue where they're so quiet that I have trouble I actually need headphones because I can't hear them that is not the case here it is a loud speaker set up a bit tinny sure but that's what you get when you're trying to eliminate speaker clutter and all the peripherals if you're okay with peripherals and with speakers being on the desk definitely look into buying them this has no base whatsoever I would love it if MSI would investigate adding a subwoofer to the back panel of this display similar to like what they've done with the GT 72 I believe their laptop the only massive gripe I have with this would be the keyboard and mouse that are included and I have a feeling that MSI is already aware of this issue because almost every user review and other professional review complain about these two items right here the problem with the keyboard it's more like the sort of scissor switch type setup that laptops have sometimes these are okay in the case of this one the actuation depth is is so picky that I have a lot of trouble typing on it my words per minute drops to about 70 I normally type it about 120 on a mechanical or a decent membrane keyboard so definitely a big impact on typing that is a functional impact and it's got some key layout things I don't like I discuss in the article really not a fan of the keyboard it's pretty cheaply made and doesn't feel great for the 2700 dollars that you spend the mouse was tracking on its own I originally thought it was an issue with the touchscreen resultant of the previous reviewer who had the unit but it's actually it was just the mouse was sort of tracking on its own when no one was touching it so not a great mouse not a great keyboard I sort of wish MSI would either just include something good or not at all because as a consumer it feels like I'm spending money on things that are gonna be thrown away and replaced so I'd rather just have a slightly lower cost when I'm buying it passed on to the buyer then have useless components or they could include something better so when would you buy an all-in-one computer well for a lot of us who DIY it's not really the best option because you could build your own system you can even build it in an SFF box if you don't have something really small and then spend $500 on a touchscreen if you really wanted that it would probably be cheaper be slight bit more powerful and really you have more control over it when things start to go wrong so it's not for us necessarily who it is for would be the user who wants to buy something that works out of the box and you can sort of set up and be done with it it's one thing one piece of hardware plus the peripherals that be the mouse and keyboard and then it's over it also offers a compact nough sub design so although a 27-inch display is large you don't need the desktop sitting around on the desk or below the desk and this can also help with dust management things like that it's fairly quiet and there's no cable clutter so no cables behind the display and no really cables inside that are going to be any kind of hassle because you'll never need to open it anyway at thirty pounds this is not portable so it might be deceptively portable in that it's one thing to carry around but it's very heavy and somewhat unwieldy the acrylic stand on the back doesn't offer the best viewing angles of the display so I hope amis I can find a solution to that the viewing angles are a bit rough if you're seated lower than the displays because you can't really turn it down to you because of the way it basically just tilts like that so obviously you'd only go for so far before it tilts forward and bad things happen and at $2,700 it's really not an unfair amount of money for the hardware that's in here if you look at comparable laptops and then add the cost of a touchscreen so where we're getting killed on price is the touchscreen remove that keep all the other hardware or word buy the cheaper two thousand dollar version and add your own SSDs they are definitely possible to add to yourself a bit of effort and the price is okay it's agreeable but still pretty painful because you're on the two grand plus range and at that point you needs to determine you know what I'd rather have a laptop and monitor that I can just in the laptop places and plug it in when I'm home and dock it or would I rather DIY if I'm capable of that or do I want this and the reason you want this is because it looks a certain way it's compact in design and there's no cable clutter so that's really all it comes down to the cons within a i/o are pretty obvious if one piece of the system goes just like with a laptop the whole thing goes you can probably get someone to work on it work on yourself and replace the mobile components but there's only so far that will get you so cons and pros very well defined just as with the laptop and check the article for more information on this hopefully this helps you make some decision on your own I can only do so much for you but the FPS charts and the thermals that look very good the price is just a bit painful and the component selection with the touchscreen not a big fan of the touchscreen just because it drives the cost up so much and then the keyboard mouse not great either the rest of it not bad in terms of performance and big fan of the thermal performance check out our patreon page if you like this type of coverage it's a big help huge shout out to warren and icon Rob the others who have supported us so far I've shouted you guys out before as you've donated so a big help from that and I will see you all next time