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 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 tunnelbear
tunnelbear makes it easy to privately and securely browse a more open internet
to try tunnelbear for free go to tunnelbear.com LTT
at a total internal volume of two and a half liters and a weight of two 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 vase amount if you didn't want to see it though honestly if you aren't
totally turned off by the gamer aesthetic it actually looks 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'll handle 4k 60hz so it's vr ready but
there's no freaking displayport port i mean okay 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
that 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 six 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
an 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
four gigahertz on all six cores and when
it comes to gaming our gtx 1070 ended up
at a comfortable 1900 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 gtx
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 like
MSI system team clearly took some inspiration from the trident 3's
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 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 m.2 or even no way
there's two more empty sodium 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 g25s 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
speaking of spending a little extra skillshare is an online learning
community with more than 17 000 classes in design photo editing and more if
you're looking for a way to pick up some new skills so you can
afford a fancy vortex g25 premium
membership gives you unlimited access to high quality classes from experts
working in their fields and skillshare is also more affordable than most
learning platforms out there with an annual subscription coming in at less
than 10 dollars a month now since skillshare is sponsoring this
video the first 200 people to use the promo link in the description will get
their first two months for free to try it out totally risk-free so go check it
out so 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 is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our
community forum which you should totally join