MSI Vortex Preview – Skylake-i7 and GTX 980 SLI in 6.5 liters
MSI still builds ‘regular’ laptops and motherboards, but the company’s focus has been on its game products for some time: video cards, motherboards, laptops and all-in-ones. At CES, the manufacturer showed a number of new products, of which the Vortex is the most eye-catching.
MSI Vortex
The Vortex is a gaming PC with a cylindrical housing, representing a volume of 6.5 liters. It’s a new concept for MSI, which immediately reminded us of Apple’s Mac Pro. Although Apple’s desktop is not gaming-oriented, unlike MSI’s, the two seem to have more in common than you might expect at first glance.
Just like Apple, MSI integrates two video cards and a processor into the cylinder, and like Apple, cooling is provided by a large fan on the top of the housing. The demonstrator on MSI’s booth featured a Core i7-6700K processor and two GTX 980 graphics cards in an mxm form factor. An MSI employee emphasized that these are ‘full’ GTX 980 GPUs, so with 2048 Cuda cores, and not the slower GTX 980M GPU with 1536 cores.
We naturally asked if an employee could remove the cover from the system so that we could view the inside, but unfortunately that was not possible. Fortunately, MSI has published a video so that we can get an idea of how the Vortex works.
Both gpus and the processor appear to be placed on a separate pcb, which are connected to each other at the bottom of the Vortex. The GPUs and the CPU are directed outwards, so that each chip has its own heatsink. In that respect, the Vortex differs from the Mac Pro, which has the chips facing the inside of the system and cools them with a central heatsink.
At the top of the system is a large fan that draws in cool air from the bottom of the Vortex and directs it past the heatsinks, after which the warm air exits the case at the top. Thanks to the large diameter of the fan, the noise production would be limited. Although it was difficult to estimate in MSI’s noisy hall, the fan noise during a game of Witcher 3 at 4k did indeed seem to be not too bad.
As mentioned, the demonstration model of the Vortex could not be easily opened, which is the intention with the model that will be available in stores. The 1151-pin socket is then accessible, so that the CPU can be replaced if necessary. The four so-dimm slots are also easy to fill, with a maximum of 64GB of DDR4 memory. For storage, there are two m2 slots in the Vortex, both of which support NVMe SSDs.
So the internal hardware has not been skimped on, and that also applies to the connections on the outside. The Vortex is equipped with four USB-A connections, two HDMI and two Ethernet connections. At the bottom of the Vortex, two more USB-C connections with Thunderbolt support and two mini displayport connections are hidden, which gives enough space for connecting peripherals and screens.
Preliminary conclusion
With the Vortex, MSI has managed to build a gaming desktop with two GPUs in SLI setup in a very small housing. That is not only a great achievement, but also a great development in the field of game hardware. After all, game PCs are increasingly moving to the living room to be connected to the television there. An ordinary desktop computer with two GTX 980 video cards usually looks out of place there, while the Vortex can be nicely concealed.
Of course, all that beauty comes with a price; the top model would cost around four thousand dollars. That is undoubtedly the price of the version with i7-6700K CPU and the two GTX 980 GPUs, but it is not yet clear what kind of SSDs and how much RAM will be involved.
An MSI employee told us that there will also be a cheaper version with a Core i5 processor and two GTX 960 video cards, which will cost around $ 2,000.