MSI Vortex G65VR 7RF Review: A gaming beast in small form factor

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The gaming industry is booming and so does the PC industry, most of the brands which usually sells hardware for PC stepped into the desktop market. One of the most popular ones is MSI which used to make PC hardware, especially graphic cards. Now it is a popular brand, selling really good desktop PCs and laptops specially built for gamers. These desktop PCs are tuned with lots of software to get the most out of all the hardware installed.

MSI Vortex G65VR 7RF is the latest release from MSI with an enormous amount of power and has the highest specs you can find on a desktop PC. The MSI Vortex is VR ready and can hold 4K gaming easily and all this comes with a portable and small design. Let us see if buying a really expensive desktop is worth it or you should build one on your own in much lesser money.

Design

MSI Vortex is a tower design desktop with a pedestal to stand on and some nice diamond edges design all over. The front has the MSI dragon logo, power button and lighting stripes, the back side got all the ports and most importantly the power port is hidden away below those ports. MSI designed the Vortex very well keeping the heat management in mind.

As we didn’t get our hands on our toolkit to open it up and see what MSI did there but we are absolutely sure about the custom PCB motherboard design just like Apple Mac Pro. The MSI Vortex takes cool air in from the bottom, cool down the components inside and exhale from the top ventilation. There is a nice MSI dragon logo at the back of the Vortex which glows up

Specifications

As I said before that the MSI Vortex got the best specs out there, here are the detailed specs of Vortex so you would know how powerful this machine is.

  • Intel Core i7 7700K, quad core processor with 4.2 GHz clock and four cores
  • 8 GB DDR4 RAM 2400 MHz, two slots used of four, max capacity 64 GB
  • 1 TB SATA hard drive 7200 rpm with Super Raid 4.0
  • Windows 10 Pro
  • Intel z170 chipset
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 with 8GB GDDR5X
  • Connectivity: 2 X Type-C Thunderbolt 3, 4 X Type-A USB 3.0, 2 X RJ-45, 2 X HDMI (4K @ 60Hz), 2 X Mini Display port, audio jack and mic in port.
  • Weight and dimension: 4 kg, 202.5 X 191.7 X 278 mm

Virtual Goodies: Applications that came preinstalled

It comes with Dragon Center utility installed which is the main control centre for all the tuning and customization of the system. It includes six tabs for different tasks; App Portal, System monitor, LED Wizard, System Tuner, Mobile Center, Tools and Help. Every needed feature is right inside this Dragon Center like monitoring the system status, change the LED colour and behaviour, connect app to PC, tune the system or get any help.

 

One more software Nahimic 2 is also came preinstalled which is MSI’s official utility for best sound for gaming. It enhances the audio according to the content if its game or multimedia, there are lots of options to tweak the audio and makes it perfect for your gaming session. Xsplit Gamecaster is also preinstalled which makes casting games easy and upload them on YouTube.

 

Performance

Starting with the boot time, MSI Vortex is super-fast in booting up and shutting down. Also, application and games launch super quick and loads up super-fast, all thanks to the 7200-rpm hard drive and Super RAID 4.0 which makes everything faster and snappier. Benchmarking the hard drive turns out with pretty good results, the read speed is 125 MB/s and write speed is 118 MB/s.

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We have done a lot of benchmarking and gaming on MSI Vortex and everything went smooth and fast. The frame rates are high and steady, kept the gameplay smooth and the loading time is also very less because of the 7200rpm hard drive and Super RAID 4.0. Here we have some of the benchmarking results for you to check; on Geekbench 4.0, it scores 177606 and on Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0, it scored 1497 with an average frame rate of 59 fps at 1600 X 900 resolution and 8XAA.

Overclocking

It doesn’t matter how much powerful your gaming rig is, game developers always find a way to make games which leave your computer’s hardware behind. So, you always had to land up on buying new hardware to upgrade your gaming PC but, if you know something about overclocking then you know you can save a lot of money. Well, lots of gamers do this trick to get more frame rates using the same hardware.

MSI Vortex has a built-in CPU tuner in Dragon Center which only tweak some settings to get the hardware ready for gaming or normal computing. But what about GPU? The answer is MSI Afterburner, you are running an MSI computer so you can easily use MSI Afterburner (the best GPU overclocking tool in the world) to get the best out of your same old GPU. Overclocking is not always recommended because if not done right, it can damage the hardware which you can’t recover after.

Pros

  • Compact size
  • Good cooling system
  • Fastest storage
  • Room to upgrade RAM

Cons

  • Price (should be under Rs 2,00,000)

Verdict

MSI Vortex G65VR 7RF is a gaming beast; it is future ready and VR ready so buying this once and leave everything behind. It is not just for gaming purposes, if you are not a hardcore gamer and just wanted a PC with highest specs to get things done faster, then MSI Vortex is the best choice. The price disappointed me a bit (Rs. 2,65,000), I am not saying that it is not worth the price. But if you know something about building a PC then you can build a far better gaming rig than this in lesser money (including a Full HD monitor).

The only problem you will find building a PC I that there is no way that you can build one this much smaller and weight less than 5 kg. So, if you want to save some space and eliminate all the problems of building a PC then MSI Vortex G65VR 7RF is the best choice you can find out there. It is available on Amazon for Rs. 2,65,000.

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About the author

amit rahi

Amit Rahi

He is a tech worm who always keeps an eye on the latest tech news. He is a master at Android and Windows “how to” articles. He knows every single bit of Android OS. You will always find him playing PC games, reading tech news, flashing custom ROMs to Android phones and blogging most of the time. At PC-Tablet, he is responsible to update the readers with latest tips, tricks, & hacks to take the most out of their gadgets.