Gadgetory

Wayne and smaller than some consoles Emma sighs new Trident enters our bench for the first product review of the week the Trident is a small form-factor gaming PC that ships in four different SKUs one of which is bare-bones and they range from 600 to $1,100 our review looks at thermals power noise and gaming performance of the $1100 unit before getting to that this content is brought to you by AMD and their rx 470 GPUs which we've generally found to be the best price to performance for their class a video card now at the sub $200 price point you can find a link in the description below for more information on those MSI's trident claims to be the smallest VR ready PC currently available it stands on this stance so there's obviously two modes of presenting it one is flat kind of like the average Lenovo office PC just like that or in the stand that it is sort of chiseled out at the bottom so you can't just stand it up without the stand or it'll be bad so that is the Trident but it's about the size of a DVR the dimensions are 346 by 72 by 232 millimeters we'll put the inches equivalent somewhere on the screen if you prefer that system and the stand makes it a little bit awkward where it's not as comfortable for me to have it this way if you've got pets or maybe you have other small creatures that might knock things over it's not the most stable setup in the world because there's no clamping system on the bottom to hold it in place but it's basically meant to be used in an HD PC environment so you put it like that or you put it flat and use it with your TV is kind of the idea looking at the ventilation of the Trident first we've got a pretty straightforward layout the right side panel has a large mesh intake that covers the video card fan and that video card is a GTX 10 63 gigabyte in MSI model of course and uses an axial cooler the CPU uses a small form-factor blower fan and that exhaust hot air out the back of the case which also helps take care of some of the warmed GPU air air exits the back of the case through the GPU expansion slot and the CP blower fan and that's supported further by some ventilation on the opposing side panel of the enclosure our unit uses an i7 6780 gigabytes of ddr4 memory a GTX 1063 gigabyte card and hosts two storage solutions a 128 gigabyte SSD and a one terabyte hard drive of Mass Storage Windows 10 is pre-installed alongside a bunch of bloatware that we instantly removed and this isn't the first time we've had to rail against MSI's use and reliance on bloatware either last time it was with one of the laptops the ge62 VR we're in testing we showed a performance degradation of 10 to 20 percent depending on which game in which bloatware was installed so it's not great for performance you should probably get rid of it immediately if you are going to buy one of these things and thankfully it's easy to remove just through sort of control panel normal functions but hopefully MSI gets the hint eventually and does kind of move away from Norton and all the various control panels and things like that regardless that's what we've got perspex the biggest marketing point here is the unit's portability and sort of DVR form factor allowing for out of mind deployment in a living room for HT BC use or enabling land gaming portability the unit we're running this one is the $1100 unit if you go look at systems priced in this range even if it's from an SI versus a DIY approach you end up with something like an I buy power or CyberPower machine or whatever that's obviously much larger than this but probably about the same price and would have a 1070 and maybe a 6700 K and if you go the DIY route of course that's also possible so the price on this at $1100 with a 10 63 gigabyte card is entirely because of the form factor you are paying for the fact that this is small it does not have a power supply inside of it which allows it to be this small and you basically plug in an AC drop to the wall just like you would with the laptop because it's always going to be less than 300 watts power drawn we'll test that in a moment so you're paying for the form factor as always our testing methodology and full written review are located in the link of the description below if you're curious about how we tested anything what drivers were used or software methods used then check that article starting with thermals thermals are the most interesting a point for this system and using our thermal testing methodology with calibrated k-type thermocouple for ambient and internal diodes for the silicon we can determine temperatures as a delta T over ambient value and then you just add in your own ambient temperature for Ralph proximation our thermal testing for systems is a little ridiculously load intensive but the idea is to generate maximum heat and see how the enclosure copes with a worst-case scenario with prime95 large FFTs and fir mark blasting the components simultaneously the CPU is hitting a delta T of about 60 6.5 Celsius or about 90 C if you add ambient back in idle temperatures about twelve point six the GPU meanwhile operates at a completely reasonable forty nine point four Celsius delta T or about seventy two seventy three if your ambient is in the 20s and the hard drive is getting a little warm @ 32.5 celsius delta T but remains acceptable overall as this scenario is taxing both primary components at 100 percent load we're dumping heat into the case that will then be recirculated by the CPUs blower fan that's creating this higher CPU temperature and under normal gaming workloads the CPU remains closer to about 84 Celsius still warm but not as bad and intense workloads push it pretty close to the limit granted 90 C isn't really anywhere as bad as what we saw with origins s FF Kronos PC a few months back which was throttling before hitting t.j.maxx considering the tightness of the enclosure it's not the world's worst small form-factor performer when it comes to thermals but it's not great either msi could certainly improve on the thermals by opting for a more aggressive fan profile particularly with the cpu even the GPU for that matter but mostly the cpu and unfortunately most of that intake is coming from the wider GPU mesh right here so all your air is being intercepted at this point and kind of relying on the GPU to bring it into the system and disperse it and that grille just sort of for the record here this one doesn't have a separate mesh or dust filter to deal with dust in an HD PC environment that's obviously concerned especially with a small form-factor system but we'll talk about that more in a moment thermal discussion is always best accompanied by power discussion measuring total system power drive from the wall connected via the tridents AC adapter we're seeing a power load of approximately 235 watts when the system is under complete maxed out load idle sits in the range of 47 watts to 51 watts and that's not bad leaving this thing sitting on for example without any sleep states you wouldn't draw much more power than a laptop load power consumption and heat generation shouldn't generally be enough to heat up the living room leaving noise to be the next obvious question from desktop and with no software running the tridents fans generate a noise output of approximately 30 1.2 DBA after calculating out the noise level of the room that's why the noise of most laptops when idle assuming fan uptime with the CPU and GPU fans pushing to higher rpms when both are under 100% load our noise increases to thirty eight point six decibels and that's borderline acceptable for most living room gaming setups in my opinion if you've got the TV next to this thing the tridents and the couch is about 10 feet away then you're probably okay but that's really a subjective point so up to you to decide that overall the noise levels aren't really that bad 38.6 DBA for a completely Mac system is pretty damn good overall for a small box considering both gaming workloads will generate a DBA output between our idle and load metrics anyway time to talk gaming performance this section is a little less interesting since the performance will largely be identical to what you'd already expect from a 10 60 and an i7 6700 started with 1080p benchmarks and ultra settings across the board our lowest fps throughput is with battlefield one at Ultra and a 96 degree horizontal fov the game averages 59 FPS with lows around 37 and 30s was reasonable but does begin to choke a bit in some more intense battles so you want to slight settings reduction one step down to compensate for that GTA 5 is the next on the chart outputting an average of 79 with low as 42 and 35 the 0.1% low metrics Doom is next and that performs adequately as well despite struggling at times with 0.1% low values and our average here is 67 and 1% lows are 39 dirt rally which we figure is more of a couch friendly game average is a frame rate of about 82 FPS with its options nearly maxed and sustains high low values through the benchmark course and dota 2 unsurprisingly has no problems at all moving on to 1440p battlefield 1 starts to struggle a bit but GTA 5 remains relatively playable aside from a few hiccups doom sits at 50 FPS now and dirt rally drops of 61 average and just for one 4k tests and some folks probably will be connecting this to 4k TVs we did see dirt rally at Ultra at around 33 fps average for 4k so it's really not a box you'd want for 4k gaming high settings or otherwise as far as vr gaming running the a three gigabyte gtx 960 is sort of pushing the limits for what an HTC vive or an oculus rift would demand raw data exhibits a few app and warp misses with low to medium settings but anything higher than that is just venturing into unpleasant territory isn't really something you should consider technically MSI is correct and that this is a VR already system and that you can play VR games and that's a big marketing point it's kind of driving me crazy how many components are going with v already as their main selling point right now but just sort of looking at that one aspect they are technically correct it's just that you would really be playing at kind of low settings maybe a mix of medium and low with the more intensive games like raw data which we've tested and Everest definitely trending towards low to medium on that one so don't expect great things out of this video card with VR but it'll work now value for this unit basically hinges entirely on its small form factors so again $1,000 $1,100 would get you probably a gtx 1070 and an equivalent or slightly better i7 in a larger form factor machine so this markup is because it's small and it's the same idea as with laptops where you're paying more because it's basically portable this is not quite as portable as a laptop of course we can throw it in a bag and it would fit fine it's also small enough to operate as a home theater PC while remaining pretty quiet and hidden to stay out of sight in the living room the chassis is well-constructed overall and survives our torture testing for thermals though the CPU starts getting hot when both components are under high load its surviving though and passing minimum requirements I guess for thermals and an SFF build there's no throttling going on which would further be aided by slightly increased fan speeds and some manual efforts and samus eye has not that aggressive fan profile gaming performance is what you'd expect it's a GTX 960 3 gigabyte with an i7 6700 both well charted components that leaves us primarily to look at overall value of the box at $1,100 there's not much that competes for SFF machines you could take the DIY route and build something like silverstone raven our vizio 2 for a bit p-per but it would also be a bit larger and if DIY is completely unappealing to you then the options are basically origins Cronos which we found a pretty questionable value given the price or the Alienware alpha which is not really a direct competitor a bare-bones variant of the Trident can be had for $600 it's basically a half-baked bare-bones version if you want to take a semi DIY approach to a machine this size you get the power adapter obviously the enclosure and then some basics like the board and a GPU I believe but you are left your own devices for storage and from memory you could probably cut down cost a little bit by going that route but it's still getting pretty close to the $1,100 price point that we saw for this thing now there's also another SKU there's an i-5 SKU for 950 dollars which really shouldn't exist at that price point I think this should come down a little bit from the 1100 price point but the 950 for an i-5 the value does kind of get a bit muddied the Trident has a few places it could improve for one a detachable dust filter on the primary intake would allow for way easier cleaning given the oft dusty nature of an HD PC environment and that caused next to nothing also nitpick that MSI is still sticking the warmth avoid if removed stickers on their panel screws which is sort of a stupid thing to do on a box like this it's not a laptop it's not tricky to get apart and put back together something like five screws and you have to dig through that warranty sticker just to clean the dust out of the GPU intake so this is one of those things where either you include a dust filter or you don't you let people open it and I'm not saying that this machine is worse than any other machine with regard to dust but in the real world the dust is a problem and it's a much bigger problem when the Box is small and when you have low thermal Headroom like this one does before heading throttle points thermals are acceptable like I said they get by but when you've got only ten or so degrees to move when you're under a maximum load scenario there's not a lot of room so to MSI is just sort of the quick suggestions for this thing for improving it I would suggest one a detachable cheap dust filter right there to get rid of the warranty void if removed threats on this particular box it's just on a laptop I can kind of understand it I know it's questionable whether those are really enforceable but on a small unit like this where it's basically a desktop and it's going to die if that's backwards if they don't open it up and clean it out I'd probably say get rid of those stickers other than that you can add probably some sort of latching mechanism down here to keep it better mounted in place because again not super stable fine I guess but if you've got people moving around or pets I would feel very unhappy with it that way probably leave it like that next suggestion VR branding as always have to be careful about it so yes it can play VR games no users should reasonably expect more than low medium low settings and then finally the bloatware please MSI get rid of it it's killing the performance the labs house were the best example because they were worse than this thing that a lot more utilities installed and performance it was pretty nasty so this is an area where it's really best I think to let the user decide what's installed and the bare-bones route would let you do that so they do have a solution if you don't want to go through the uninstall process what you should do but still it's I don't know that the the b2b partnerships with people like Norton and all the other software utilities all the control panels all the audio panels all this stuff I don't know that it's worth it because it makes performance out of box look worse than competitors and that's not what you ever want so those would be the main suggestions and the nitpicks for this machine all this said with the grievances aside the chassis is well-constructed I like the form factor despite this being sort of not the most stable base it is artistically interesting because of the way they've angled it although not obviously really only got one other option which is flat like that so it's well built for $1000 it would be a much easier buy at 1,100 it is kind of makes me feel a little a little weird about it but $1,000 you're in better shape it's just again you're sacrificing for size basically so that is the Trident considering the density of the unit the thermals under gaming loads are fine noise is fine FPS is fine but that's really all it is it's just kind of everything is acceptable or fine there's nothing revolutionary the price reduction would help a bit in that regard so as always pay channeling the post roll video help us out directly screamo for more information the full review leave a comment because if you don't you too but will punish our video apparently that's what's going on this week I'll see you all next time you