Gadgetory

my first exposure to the ages TI bare-bones gaming desktop from msi was through this article on Tom's hardware and I'm not sure why but I thought for some reason that it was a compact SLI gaming desktop so when it arrived in a box the size of a small car the only thing I could think was well I hope MSI has packed a lot of innovation in there because if the computer itself is that big this thing is going to be pretty hard to recommend cooller masters master case maker five features they're freeform modular system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in the video description let's start with the good news the ages Ti is very well packed inside that enormous box so while it's not really any smaller than I'd expect a typical M ATX computer to be it's also not larger to the point where I feel like the engineering effort that went into creating its non-standard internals was a complete waste of time maybe we'll see and I suppose that there are aesthetic reasons for it too whether you generally like the gamer look or not you're likely to agree that the Aegis Ti is striking the front along with its solid i/o mix including a DVD Drive two USB three ten gigabit ports one type C and one type a a USB three five gigabit port audio jacks and an HDMI pass-through for VR Roxann RGB lit aggressively postured design whose helmet inspired grills windows and emblems work together shockingly well the top and sides are no different with ample cooling vents a GPU window that shows off the msi gtx 1070 gaming X cards that I installed in SLI and a solid metal carrying handle being the standout features of the box that sits on top of the bottom pedestal that contains the included 850 watt 80 + platinum power supply and two three and a half inch hard drive bays with pre-wired SATA power and data cables in terms of rear i/o we've got a pretty bog-standard layout here with the ps2 port being a welcome inclusion let's go inside because from out here it's hard to say much about YMS I felt the need to do anything to the standard n ATX layout in order to fit two graphics cards into a machine this size and because my unit is a bare-bones so we won't be doing anything else with it until we open it up and install a CPU Ram drives video cards and an operating system so it turns out the answer to why they needed to do that is not ease-of-use for a bare-bones with a custom chassis and motherboard this thing is really not very easy to build in some stuff is handled well two of the DIMM slots and the two m dot 2 SSD slots are crazy easy to access from the side the hard drives in the bottom foot have the cables pre run and the single tuna 1/2 inch SSD on the side though it annoys me that they didn't include hardware for the 2 others can be installed in less than a minute but the other third and fourth DIMM slots are on the other side of the motherboard making them awkward to reach with the CPU cooler radiator installed though that's honestly the least of my concerns because you'll need to remove this entire bracket which interestingly seems to have enough room for a dual read if you wanted to install your CPU anyway so poor cable management and a lot of things needing to be moved out of the way is my biggest complaint down here which leads us then to the video cards they look simple slide the video card in this way and oh wait a second those aren't thumb screws how do I get a screwdriver in here oh so I have to undo these two screws for the top fascia undo another 5 screws to open up this hinge with the fan attached to it then I can slide the optical drive forward to make room to put the graphics cards in finally install them plug in the again poorly cable managed cables for PCI Express power plug in the SLI bridges and then Jam the optical drive back into place and close it all up again I just don't think that any of that would be very intuitive for a new system builder and in some ways I think it would be even more difficult than building a standard system from scratch it's little things like the inclusion of these ridiculously long SLI bridges instead of a proper high bandwidth hard bridge that's already at the right spacing with MSI's own video cards installed I'm forced to either have them stick up and mash against that top grill or go down and catch in the fan stuff that doesn't look like it should go together can be very confusing for the target audience that I would think MSI is trying to hit with a bare-bones system and the bottom line here is that 11 screws is too many to swap out the graphics cards compare that to razor's core which is tooless though it should be noted my thumb screw was too tight to remove by hand out of the box I ended up needing to get a screwdriver and this feels like a design from yesteryear from a user friendliness perspective and while we're at it then I might have suggested straight HDMI connectors for that VR pass-through thing firing up the bios more lack of polish I remember seeing MSI p67 boards that had a more elegant UEFI interface than this one the worst offender is the legacy boot mode being grayed out and not working at all in my shipping BIOS without doing some configuration gymnastics and I sincerely hope to see some improvement here in the future with that said with the actual assembly complete the story gets quite a bit better cooling performance is a wonderful and this system with its four 120 millimeter fans is really quiet CPU die attempts in the neighborhood of 70 degrees even in a toasty warehouse on a hot day with the 400 megahertz factory overclock enabled by that big dragon button on the front is nothing to sneeze at and the way that MSI has separated my open air-cooled GTX 10 70s from the rest of the components means that GPU boost speeds averaging over 1800 megahertz in real world applications were easily achievable so I was running Crysis 3 at 4k and SLI for the duration of this test which I guess leads us well into performance then if you've seen a slightly overclocked 6700 K with gtx 1070 sli none of this is going to surprise you much but I think the bigger conversation here is about whether SLI makes sense at all right now with the GTX 1080 be capable of handling pretty well anything you can throw at it and the future of multi-gpu pretty clouded right now with the implementation being largely up to game developers as they switch over to DirectX 12 and Vulcan which you can learn more about here but I guess that's the tactic here from MSI if the customer wants tiny gaming and is willing to settle for single GPU they've got that covered but if they want no compromises they offer that too and at a much more palatable price premium compared to some of the bare bones that we've checked out recently like zou tax Magnus and 980 for $1,600 and Emma size on vortex for that matter so the aegis Ti is 650 bucks for a well ventilated RGB lit case a decent 850 watt power supply as e170 motherboard and a liquid cooler actually not bad at all like tunnel bear tunnel bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open Internet with tunnel bear all you got to do is hit the little button after you install the program and boom your connection is encrypted and your internet provider advertisers and anyone else looking to track you or profit from your data is going to have to deal with that and Tunnel Bears top rated privacy policy that does not include data logging if you want to try total bear out for free you get 500 Meg's with no credit card required and should you choose to get a year of unlimited data you can actually save 10% by heading over to tunnel bear comm /l tt we've got that linked in the video description thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the description 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