my first exposure to the aesti barebones
gaming desktop from MSI was through this article on Tom's
Hardware and I'm not sure why but I
thought for some reason that it was a compact SLI gaming desktop so when it
arrived in a box the size of a small car
the only thing I could think was well I
hope MSI has packed a lot of innovation
in there because if the computer itself is that big this thing is gonna be
pretty hard to
recommend cooler Masters masterc case maker 5 features their freeform modular
system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in
the video description let's start with the good
news the hsti is very well packed inside
that enormous box so while it's not really any smaller than I'd expect a
typical matx computer to be it's also not larger to the point where I feel
like the engineering effort that went into creating its non-standard internals
was a complete waste of time maybe we'll see and I suppose that there are
aesthetic reasons for it too whether you generally like the Gamer look or not
you're likely to agree that the aesti is striking the front along with its solid
IO mix including a DVD drive two USB 3 10 GB ports one type c and one type A a
USB 3 5 GB Port audio jacks and an HDMI
pass through for VR rocks an RGB lit
aggressively postured design whose helmet inspired grills Windows and
emblems work together shockingly well the top and sides are no different with
ample cooling vents a GPU window that shows off the MSI GTX 1070 gaming X
cards that I installed in SLI and a solid metal carrying handle being the
standout features of the box that sits on top of the bottom pedestal that
contains the included 850 wat 80 plus Platinum power supply and two 3 and 1/2
in hard drive Bays with pre-wired SATA power and data cables in terms of rear
IO we've got a pretty bog standard layout here with the PS2 Port being a
welcome inclusion let's go inside because from out here it's hard to say
much about why MSI felt the need to do anything to the standard natx layout in
order to fit two graphics cards into a machine this size and because my unit is
a barebone so we won't be doing anything else with it until we open it up and
install a CPU RAM drives video cards and
an operating system so it turns out the answer to why
they needed to do that is not ease of use for a bare bones with a custom
chassis and motherboard this thing is is
really not very easy to build in some stuff is handled well two of the dim
slots and the two m.2 SSD slots are
crazy easy to access from the side the hard drives in the bottom foot have the
cables pre-run and the single 2 and 1 12 in SSD on the side though it annoys me
that they didn't include hardware for the two others can be installed in less
than a minute but the other third and
fourth dim slots are on the other side of the motherboard making them awkward
to reach with the CPU Cooler radiator installed though that's honestly the
least of my concerns because you'll need to remove this entire bracket which
interestingly seems to have enough room for a dual rad if you wanted to install
your CPU anyway so poor cable management
and a lot of things needing to be moved out of the way is my biggest complaint
down here which leads us then to the video cards they look simple Slide the
video card in this way and oh hm wait a second those aren't thumb screws how how
do I get a screwdriver in here
oh so I have to undo these two screws
for the top fascia undo another five screws to open up this hinge with the
fan attached to it then I can slide the
optical drive forward to make room to put the graphics cards in finally
install them plug in the again poorly cable managed cables for PCI Express
power plug in the SLI Bridges and then
Jam the optical drive back into place and close it all up again I just don't
think that any of that would be very intuitive for a new system builder and
in some ways I think it would be even more difficult than building a standard
system from scratch it's little things like the inclusion of these ridiculously
long SLI Bridges instead of a proper high bandwidth hard Bridge that's
already at the right spacing with MSI's
own video cards installed I'm forced to
either have them stick up and mash against that top grill or go down and
catch in the fan stuff that doesn't look
like it should go together can be very confusing for the target audience that I
would think MSI is trying to hit with a barebone system and the bottom line here
is that 11 screws is too many to swap
out the graphics cards compare that to razer's core which is toolless though it
should be noted my thumb screw was too tight to remove by hand out of the box I
ended up needing to get a screwdriver and this feels like a design from yester
Year from a user friendliness perspective and while we're at it then I
might have suggested straight HDMI connectors for that VR pass through
thing firing up the BIOS more lack of
Polish I remember seeing MSI p67 boards
that had a more elegant UEFI interface than this one the worst offender is is
the Legacy boot mode being grayed out and not working at all in my shipping
BIOS without doing some configuration gymnastics and I sincerely hope to see
some improvement here in the future with that said with the actual
assembly complete the story gets quite a bit better cooling performance is
wonderful and this system with its 4 120
mm fans is really quiet CPU die temps in
the neighborhood of 70° even in a toasty Warehouse on a hot day with the 400 mahz
Factory overclock enabled by that big dragon button on the front is nothing to
sneeze at and the way that MSI has separated my open air cool GTX 1070s
from the rest of the components means that GPU boost speeds averaging over
1,800 MHz in real world applications
were easily achievable so I was running Crisis 3 at 4K in SLI for the the
duration of this test which I guess leads us well into performance then if
you've seen a slightly overclocked 6700k with GTX 1070 SLI none of this is going
to surprise you much but I think the bigger conversation here is about
whether SLI makes sense at all right now with the GTX 1080 capable of handling
pretty well anything you can throw at it and the future of multi-GPU pretty
clouded right now with the implementation being largely up to game
developers as they switch over to directx12 and Vulcan which you can learn
more about here but I guess that's the tactic here
from MSI if the customer wants tiny gaming and is willing to settle for
single GPU they've got that covered but if they want no compromises they offer
that too and at a much more palatable price premium compared to some of the
Bare Bones that we've checked out recently like Zotac Magnus n980 for
$1600 and MSI own vortex for that matter
so the hsti is 650 bucks for a well
ventilated RGB lit case a decent 850 W
power supply a z170 motherboard and a
liquid cooler actually not bad at
all like tunnel bear tunnel bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to
browse privately and enjoy a more open internet with tunnel Bear all you got to
do is hit the little button after you install the program and boom your
connection is encrypted and your internet provider advertisers and anyone
else looking to track you or profit from your data is going to have to deal with
that and tunnel Bear's top rated privacy policy that does not include data
logging if you want to try tunnel bear out for free you get 500 Megs with no
credit card required and should you choose to get a year of unlimited data
you can actually save 10% by heading over to tunnel bear.com
we've got that Linked In the video
description 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 now that you're done doing all that
stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our
latest episode of holy
what was the latest episode
right where I check out a $40,000 computer