With its six core 12 thread core i7 processor the machine in my hands is not only
more
powerful than the impressively compact msi trident that we reviewed before it is less than half of
the size the
msi, vortex g25 is a
totally different kind of beast is it a desktop is it a
gaming laptop with the screen ripped off and
And also, no keyboard and hopefully no noise or heating issues
I mean is anyone really expecting us to answer these questions before we tell you that today's video is brought to you by Tunnel Bear
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At a total internal volume of two and a half liters and a weight of 2 and a half kilograms the vortex g25 is a
strikingly slim machine
It is so tiny that you could easily hide it on the back of your TV or monitor
Using the included vesa mount if you didn't want to see it though
honestly
If you aren't totally turned off by the gamer aesthetic it actually looked pretty good both
Horizontally in a TV console or vertically on the included stand though, I would recommend
Fine-tuning the RGB lighting a little bit for the latter to keep things classy
IO is
Curious it's got two HDMI 2.0 ports that will handle 4k 60 Hertz, so it's VR ready
But there's no freaking DisplayPort port. I mean ok yes. There is a
Thunderbolt 3 on the back that can be used for that purpose
But would even a mini DP or an included dongle have been too much to ask
MSI out of the box there was no way for Alex to hook the g25 up to the older HDMI 1.4
4k monitor on his desk while he was working on this review
said the rest of the i/o is pretty solid a good mix of USB and
networking and a couple of strong indications that MSI thinks that one of these would go great in your living room a
digital audio out and a
12-volt DC out so that you can power a room scale VR headset like the HTC vive
without an additional wall adapter, nice
Inside this thing is a monster. It features Intel's Core i7
8700 with 6 cores of up to 4.6 gigahertz turbo Madness and a gtx
1070 GPU so i'm expecting some phenomenal gaming performance in our benchmarks if that is
Msi can stop that hardware from getting hotter than the seat of my pants after evening of dining at Taco Bell
gross and
Good news. I wouldn't quite call the g25 silent, but from an arm's length away
It's hardly noticeable with a sound quality that is easily
forgotten and our CPU leveled out in the mid 70s while maintaining a
respectable 4 gigahertz on all six course and when it comes to gaming our gtx 1070 ended up at a
Comfortable nineteen hundred megahertz at 70 degrees Celsius that is right up there with a desktop card
Though it should be noted that when the vortex is placed horizontally
You can expect your temps to rise by about 10 degrees
Now we didn't see any performance drop due to that in our 24 degree office
But this could be a problem if you don't have air conditioning
Now it should come as no surprise that when you combine impressive hardware with impressive cooling you get
impressive gaming performance and the g25 hung right in there with our standard desktop hardware test bench and
While it did actually lose out to the asrock desk mini, another
Impressively small gaming system. It should be noted that that one costs a lot more
Due to its more expensive
GT X 1080 graphics card and
It wasn't even able to take full advantage of that card due to its thermal throttling
So let's rip this thing open and have a look at the secret sauce that MSI calls cooler boost Titan
It's a dumb name sure, but I can't argue with the results. I mean look at this eight heat pipes, Errrhuh
MSI's system team clearly took some inspiration from the trident threes
Notebook like cooling system and improved on it before cramming it in here
It's just that instead of a regular full-size PCIe 16x GPU we get a notebook
GPU on an MXM module so that is what allows the vortex to be so slim
but it also brings along the disadvantage
of making future upgrades of more difficult or even impossible
If nvidia decides to stop supporting this form factor while we were poking around inside we noticed that our
16 gig ram model had an empty slot making an upgrade to 32 gigs easy
Nice, then with the back screws out the top also comes off with a bit of love from a prying tool to give us
access to the other side of the motherboard where you can upgrade the two and a half inch drive add another
m2 or even no way there's two more empty sodimm slots for up to
64 gigs of ram I mean
badass book sized workstation anyone badass yes cheap?
No.
as we learned from the asrock desk mini video,
MXM cards cost
Significantly more than their standard counterparts and this hurts the vortex
g25's value proposition the good news is that compared to similar small form-factor solutions
It's not that far off
But the bad news is that for the 1070 model with an i7 you're looking at a cool two thousand dollars
Bringing us back to the original question is this a tiny high performance desktop
Or is it a bulky laptop without a screen and a keyboard well with this kind of performance
I'm inclined to go with the former and it gets a solid recommendation if you're willing to spend the extra
To save a little space on your desk
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