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with its six core 12 thread core i7

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processor the machine in my hands is not only

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more powerful than the impressively compact MSI trident that we reviewed

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before it is less than half

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of the size the MSI vortex g25 is a totally

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different kind of beast is it a desktop

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is it a gaming laptop with the screen ripped off

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and also no keyboard and hopefully no noise or heating issues

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i mean is anyone really expecting us to answer these questions before we tell

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at a total internal volume of two and a half liters and a weight of two and a

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half kilograms the vortex g25 is a

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strikingly slim machine it is so tiny

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that you could easily hide it on the back of your tv or monitor using the

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included vase amount if you didn't want to see it though honestly if you aren't

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totally turned off by the gamer aesthetic it actually looks pretty good

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both horizontally in a tv console or vertically on the included stand

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though i would recommend fine-tuning the RGB lighting a little bit for the latter

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to keep things classy io is curious

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it's got two HDMI 2.0 ports that'll handle 4k 60hz so it's vr ready but

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there's no freaking displayport port i mean okay yes there is a Thunderbolt 3

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on the back that can be used for that purpose

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but would even a mini dp or an included

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dongle have been too much to ask MSI out of the box there was no way for alex to

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hook the g25 up to the older HDMI 1.4 4k monitor on

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his desk while he was working on this review

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that said the rest of the i o is pretty solid a good mix of usb and networking

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and a couple of strong indications that MSI thinks that one of these would go

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great in your living room a digital audio out and a 12 volt dc out so that

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you can power a room scale vr headset like the htc vive without an additional

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wall adapter nice inside this thing is a

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monster it features Intel's core i7 8700

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with six cores of up to 4.6 gigahertz

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turbo madness and a gtx 1070 GPU so i'm

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expecting some phenomenal gaming performance in our benchmarks if that is

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MSI can stop that hardware from getting hotter than the seat of my pants after

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an evening of dining at taco bell gross and

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good news i wouldn't quite call the g25 silent but

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from an ARM's length away it's hardly noticeable with a sound quality that is

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easily forgotten and our CPU leveled out in the

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mid 70s while maintaining a respectable

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four gigahertz on all six cores and when

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it comes to gaming our gtx 1070 ended up

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at a comfortable 1900 megahertz at 70

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degrees celsius that is right up there with a desktop card

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though it should be noted that when the vortex is placed horizontally you can

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expect your temps to rise by about 10 degrees

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now we didn't see any performance drop due to that in our 24 degree office but

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this could be a problem if you don't have air conditioning now it should come

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as no surprise that when you combine impressive hardware with impressive

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cooling you get impressive gaming performance and the g25 hung right in

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there with our standard desktop hardware test bench and while it did actually

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lose out to the asrock desk mini another

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impressively small gaming system it should be noted that that one costs a

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lot more due to its more expensive gtx

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1080 graphics card and it wasn't even able to take full

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advantage of that card due to its thermal throttling so let's rip this

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thing open and have a look at the secret sauce that MSI calls cooler boost titan

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it's a dumb name sure but i can't argue with the results i mean look at this

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eight heat pipes like

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MSI system team clearly took some inspiration from the trident 3's

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notebook-like cooling system and improved on it before cramming it in

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here it's just that instead of a regular

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full-size PCIe 16x GPU we get a notebook

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GPU on an mxm module

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so that is what allows the vortex to be

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so slim but it also brings along the

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disadvantage of making future upgrades more difficult or even impossible if

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NVIDIA decides to stop supporting this form factor while we were poking around

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inside we noticed that our 16 gig RAM model had an empty slot making an

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upgrade to 32 gigs easy

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nice then with the back screws out the top

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also comes off with a bit of love from a prying tool to give us access to the

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other side of the motherboard where you can upgrade the two and a half inch

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drive add another m.2 or even no way

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there's two more empty sodium slots for

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up to 64 gigs of RAM i mean

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badass book sized workstation anyone

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badass yes cheap no

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as we learned from the asrock desk mini video mxm cards cost significantly more

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than their standard counterparts and this hurts the vortex g25s value

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proposition the good news is that compared to

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similar small form factor solutions it's not that far off but the bad news is

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that for the 1070 model with an i7 you're looking at a cool two thousand

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dollars bringing us back to the original question is this a tiny high-performance

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desktop or is it a bulky laptop without a screen

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and a keyboard well with this kind of performance i'm

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inclined to go with the former and it gets a solid recommendation if you're

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willing to spend the extra to save a little space on your desk

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out so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if

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it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to

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where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the

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description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our

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community forum which you should totally join