As VR expands into the mainstream (or at least that's manufacturers' bet), gamers will be looking for a small form factor or portable gaming rig to power their new headsets. Lugging around a full sized gaming PC isn't always practical though, so MSI is looking to change that with their new Trident 3 Arctic. It is a limited edition upgrade to their previous generation Trident 3 PC.
The new Arctic variant sports a customized GTX 1070 graphics card in an ITX format. Paired up with a 7th-gen Core i7-7700 running at 3.6GHz on the H110 chipset. It's not unlocked and is running at a relatively slow clock speed compared to the potential of the 7700k, but this is clearly a thermal trade-off. MSI could have bumped this up, but then the overall system would run hotter and louder.
The Trident 3 also comes with 16GB of 2400MHz DDR4 that is expandable up to 32GB. For storage, there is a 256GB M.2 SSD and a 1TB spinning HDD. Aimed at the VR market, MSI has included an HDMI port on the front of the unit with an accompanying pass-through to the back. Their software is also designed to optimize the system for VR gaming.
MSI claims the system only reaches 32dB at full load which if true, is surprisingly quiet for the hardware inside. For power, the Arctic runs off a 330W adapter. Finally and as expected, the Trident 3 Arctic features RGB lighting on the system.
Small form factor PCs often suffer from loud fans and/or high temperatures due to the cramped internals but hopefully MSI has tuned the system so this isn't an issue. Stay tuned as we may review one of these in the coming weeks. The Trident 3 Arctic retails for $1500 and will become available soon from usual retailers including Newegg, Amazon, Microsoft, and Fry's.
https://www.techspot.com/news/68695-msi-launches-console-sized-vr-ready-gaming-pc.html
