MSI Trident X review: Intel Core i9-10900K and GeForce RTX 2080 Super in a compact tower
By João Carrasqueira · Sep 5, 2020 14:00 EDT
By João Carrasqueira · Sep 5, 2020 14:00 EDT
[SHOWTOGROUPS=4,20,22]
MSI introduced a whole bunch of gaming PCs earlier this summer, and in typical MSI fashion, they're quite beastly machines. However, the one that got my attention the most was the Trident X, and that's mostly thanks to its form factor. MSI packed all the specs you could ask for from a gaming PC into a 10-liter chassis, which makes the Trident X feel like an oversized, and very powerful, console.
The configuration MSI sent me is almost at the top of the range. It packs the Intel Core i9-10900K 10-core CPU, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 Super, and 32GB of RAM, which means that you can throw pretty much anything at this thing and it will handle it just fine. I'm not usually much of a PC gamer, but I have to appreciate MSI's ability to put so much power into such a compact package, all while still allowing it to be upgradeable.
Specs
Performance
With gaming PCs, it's all about performance, so let's just jump right into it. I took the opportunity to play through Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and its sequel, Gears 5, and a bit of Forza Horizon 4. I also played the trial version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, since I wanted to test a game with RTX support. Most of this was played on my 1080p 60Hz monitor, so as you can expect, this computer didn't really break a sweat most of the time.
Knowing this, I asked LG to send me one of its gaming monitors, and I ended up getting the UltraGear 27GN950, a 4K monitor with a 144Hz refresh rate - I'll talk about it more later on. This allowed me to really push the Trident X, though I didn't get a ton of time with the monitor to try it with many different games. With this monitor, I recorded footage from a few games using the Xbox Game Bar overlay, which means footage was recorded to 1080p and 36 frames per second, plus there's some compression, but the games themselves were always set to 4K, and you'll be able to see the current frame rate in the top right corner, courtesy of the GeForce Experience overlay.
Here's me playing the first chapter of Gears 5. In this playthrough, HDR was on, and all of the quality settings were set to Ultra, except for ambient occlusion, which was causing some very noticeable artifacts in parts of the game. I turned it off completely. You can see that the framerate is usually close to 70FPS.
I also love Rocket League, and it's a fairly popular e-sports title, so I wanted to check out performance on it. Like Gears 5, all the settings were maxed out here and I was playing in 4K. However, I did turn off motion blur because I personally don't like the effect. Frame rates here were always above 120FPS, and often maxed out the refresh rate of the monitor. And before you point it out, yes, I do suck at Rocket League.
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Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the real test for the GPU, especially thanks to its ray tracing support and the fact that it's just a beautiful game. Seriously, I was blown away most of the time I was playing this. I decided to run the game's benchmark with all the settings maxed out, and here you can see the Trident X struggling to keep up.
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For actual gameplay, I turned down the settings a bit to make the game playable, which I considered to be frame rates above 30FPS. But even with my adjustments, you'll see that it would be generous to call it playable in the later scenes of the game, where lots of enemies show up.
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Of course, you'd have ample room to turn down the settings here to get a smoother experience, I just really wanted to push this PC to the limit.
I also tried rendering video on the Trident X, and I specifically rendered all three gameplay videos above using both the Game Ready driver and the Studio driver from Nvidia. The Studio driver is supposed to be optimized for creative workflows, but I actually got slightly worse render times with it, as you can see below. The videos were rendered to 1080p at 30 frames per second.
To get an even better idea of the performance here, I ran a handful of benchmarks, including 3DMark Time Spy and VRMark Orange Room. Of course, the results are high across the board. In 3DMark, it did fall short of a premium gaming PC, but that configuration includes two Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in SLI, so that's no surprise. For what it's worth, these tests were run while I was using my 1080p monitor, though I'm not sure if it makes a difference.
For cooling, MSI designed what it calls Silent Storm Cooling 3, which isolates three of the biggest heat-generating components - the PSU, CPU, and GPU. Each contained in its own chamber, so the heat from one can't affect the other and create further thermal constraints. This thing is also full of vents to make airflow easier.
I'd say it worked, because the Trident X isn't a very loud PC most of the time. When the fans do ramp up, they mostly have a soft "whoosh" noise that isn't too distracting, though video rendering does make the GPU fans spin pretty hard. There have been rare occasions when I heard a sort of whining noise coming from the CPU area, but I couldn't be sure if it was the fan itself. Otherwise, even having the PC right next to me on the desk, I never felt like it was too loud.
Outside of gaming and the traditional performance benchmarks, though, there are issues I need to point out. The PC ships with Windows 10 version 1909, and updating to version 2004 through Windows Update hung at 82% both times I tried, wasting five hours of my time. I eventually updated using the Update Assistant, but that still took ridiculously long, both during the initial setup process and the reboot sequences, to the point where I had to leave it running overnight.
I've also noticed issues, like opening an app from the Start menu doesn't dismiss the Start menu most of the time, Telegram notifications in the Action Center don't open the app, and Для просмотра ссылки Войдиили Зарегистрируйсяcan't play successive videos in a playlist, as it just fails to load the next video. These issues all persisted after resets, and even after reverting to the factory settings using MSI's recovery partition. Usually, I'd format all the drives and install Windows from scratch to see if the issues would be resolved, but that process can take some time and I had no guarantee that it would fix it. It's also not fair to expect that most customers will do this when they get a new PC, so this kind of issue shouldn't be happening either way.
[/SHOWTOGROUPS]
MSI introduced a whole bunch of gaming PCs earlier this summer, and in typical MSI fashion, they're quite beastly machines. However, the one that got my attention the most was the Trident X, and that's mostly thanks to its form factor. MSI packed all the specs you could ask for from a gaming PC into a 10-liter chassis, which makes the Trident X feel like an oversized, and very powerful, console.
The configuration MSI sent me is almost at the top of the range. It packs the Intel Core i9-10900K 10-core CPU, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 Super, and 32GB of RAM, which means that you can throw pretty much anything at this thing and it will handle it just fine. I'm not usually much of a PC gamer, but I have to appreciate MSI's ability to put so much power into such a compact package, all while still allowing it to be upgradeable.
Specs
CPU | 10th generation Intel Core i9-10900K (10 cores, 3.7GHz base, 5.3GHz boost) |
---|---|
GPU | MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Super Ventus (8GB GDDR6 dedicated) |
Memory | 32GB (2x16GB) 2933MHz |
SSD | 2x1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe in RAID 0 |
HDD | 2TB 5400 rpm SATA (plus one empty 2.5-inch slot) |
Body | 396.57x137.06x410.39mm (15.61x5.4x16.16in), 6.55kg (14.44lbs) |
Ports | Rear: (2) USB 2.0 Type-A (2) USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A (1) USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A (1) Thunderbolt 3 (1) S/PDIF out 5 audio jacks GPU: (3) DisplayPort 1.4 (1) HDMI 2.0b Front: (1) USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-C (1) USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A (1) USB 2.0 Type-A (1) 3.5mm speaker (1) 3.5mm microphone |
Power supply | 650W 80 Plus Gold certified |
Chassis | 10.36-liter, black, interchangeable metal/glass side panel |
OS | Windows 10 Home |
Price | €3,199 |
Performance
With gaming PCs, it's all about performance, so let's just jump right into it. I took the opportunity to play through Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and its sequel, Gears 5, and a bit of Forza Horizon 4. I also played the trial version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, since I wanted to test a game with RTX support. Most of this was played on my 1080p 60Hz monitor, so as you can expect, this computer didn't really break a sweat most of the time.
Knowing this, I asked LG to send me one of its gaming monitors, and I ended up getting the UltraGear 27GN950, a 4K monitor with a 144Hz refresh rate - I'll talk about it more later on. This allowed me to really push the Trident X, though I didn't get a ton of time with the monitor to try it with many different games. With this monitor, I recorded footage from a few games using the Xbox Game Bar overlay, which means footage was recorded to 1080p and 36 frames per second, plus there's some compression, but the games themselves were always set to 4K, and you'll be able to see the current frame rate in the top right corner, courtesy of the GeForce Experience overlay.
Here's me playing the first chapter of Gears 5. In this playthrough, HDR was on, and all of the quality settings were set to Ultra, except for ambient occlusion, which was causing some very noticeable artifacts in parts of the game. I turned it off completely. You can see that the framerate is usually close to 70FPS.
I also love Rocket League, and it's a fairly popular e-sports title, so I wanted to check out performance on it. Like Gears 5, all the settings were maxed out here and I was playing in 4K. However, I did turn off motion blur because I personally don't like the effect. Frame rates here were always above 120FPS, and often maxed out the refresh rate of the monitor. And before you point it out, yes, I do suck at Rocket League.
Для просмотра ссылки Войди
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the real test for the GPU, especially thanks to its ray tracing support and the fact that it's just a beautiful game. Seriously, I was blown away most of the time I was playing this. I decided to run the game's benchmark with all the settings maxed out, and here you can see the Trident X struggling to keep up.
Для просмотра ссылки Войди
For actual gameplay, I turned down the settings a bit to make the game playable, which I considered to be frame rates above 30FPS. But even with my adjustments, you'll see that it would be generous to call it playable in the later scenes of the game, where lots of enemies show up.
Для просмотра ссылки Войди
Of course, you'd have ample room to turn down the settings here to get a smoother experience, I just really wanted to push this PC to the limit.
I also tried rendering video on the Trident X, and I specifically rendered all three gameplay videos above using both the Game Ready driver and the Studio driver from Nvidia. The Studio driver is supposed to be optimized for creative workflows, but I actually got slightly worse render times with it, as you can see below. The videos were rendered to 1080p at 30 frames per second.
Game Ready driver (MM:SS) | Studio driver (MM:SS) | |
---|---|---|
Gears 5 | 07:13 | 07:27 |
Rocket League | 05:08 | 05:13 |
Shadow of the Tomb Raider | 12:18 | 12:25 |
3DMark Time Spy | VRMark Orange Room |
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PCMark 8: Home | PCMark 8: Creative |
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PCMark 8: Work | PCMark10 |
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I'd say it worked, because the Trident X isn't a very loud PC most of the time. When the fans do ramp up, they mostly have a soft "whoosh" noise that isn't too distracting, though video rendering does make the GPU fans spin pretty hard. There have been rare occasions when I heard a sort of whining noise coming from the CPU area, but I couldn't be sure if it was the fan itself. Otherwise, even having the PC right next to me on the desk, I never felt like it was too loud.
Outside of gaming and the traditional performance benchmarks, though, there are issues I need to point out. The PC ships with Windows 10 version 1909, and updating to version 2004 through Windows Update hung at 82% both times I tried, wasting five hours of my time. I eventually updated using the Update Assistant, but that still took ridiculously long, both during the initial setup process and the reboot sequences, to the point where I had to leave it running overnight.
I've also noticed issues, like opening an app from the Start menu doesn't dismiss the Start menu most of the time, Telegram notifications in the Action Center don't open the app, and Для просмотра ссылки Войди
[/SHOWTOGROUPS]