MSI Begins Shipping Vortex: A Mini PC With Monstrous Power (Really)

In January, Rob and I both met with MSI at CES 2016, and to say that we left that meeting impressed doesn’t do our impressions justice.  Helping in my opinion was the HTC Vive the company had setup, driven by one of its own NVIDIA GTX 970M equipped notebooks.  Also being shown off were the incredible MSI GT72S Tobii gaming notebook and an impressive little thing called the Vortex.  When we first saw the Vortex and realized what we were looking at, parallels to the Mac Pro immediately came to mind.  Referred to by MSI as a “gaming cylinder” the Vortex brings desktop PC power in a chassis measuring only 10.5 inches tall.

Stocked with an Intel Core i7-6700K, up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, SSDs in Super RAID 4 (consisting of two PCI-E 3.0-based NVMs SSDs in RAID 0), and dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 GPUs in SLI, the Vortex brings plenty of power to the table.  Promising superior upgradability, expandability, and compatibility with a variety of connectors, including Thunderbolt 3 that supports up to 40Gb/s of data transfer rate.

With a minimal footprint, you might ask how all this hardware can remain cool.  To address these realistic concerns, the Vortex features MSI’s 360° Silent Storm Cooling technology to ensure extreme coolness under the most intense gaming sessions.  MSI’s cooling system creates a vortex-shaped wind path by capturing heat from the bottom of the unit and circulating it upwards, resulting in superior thermals and acoustics. A 450W 80 Plus Gold power supply is also built into the Vortex to minimize space and to completely power the system and any peripherals you want to connect.

“The revolutionary Vortex gaming tower shatters the misconception that bigger systems deliver more power and performance,” says Andy Tung, president of MSI Pan America. “The groundbreaking system maximizes space and heat dissipation to unlock the power of its components for truly astronomical performance in a Subwoofer size.”

MSI’s Vortex can simultaneously support up to six video outputs for intense multi-tasking and multi-screen experiences, is 4K ready, delivers lag-free gaming with Killer DoubleShot X3 connectivity, and offers an immersive multimedia experience with Nahimic Military X Gaming, the first audio technology adopted by the French Army to vividly reproduce audio in its aircraft training simulators.

The MSI Vortex is an exciting new product from MSI and one that we’re looking forward to following.  The compact nature of the Vortex means a much smaller footprint for users, but also hints at difficulty in upgrading some components down the road.  Our focus on the GPUs being at the center of our questions.  It’s clear that a GPU with a reference cooler will not fit inside of the Vortex, so the upgrade path seems limited to MSI SKUs.  Knowing that when you sign up for the Vortex, the road ahead should be clear and open.