MSI Vortex G65 Un-build Log

[mariushm]

It's an interesting PC but I don't like the amount of screws and individual components / modules and the amount of work you have to do to service it.

 

My few observations :

 

1. Since it's a completely custom system and they use a custom power supply they could have gone an extra step and use a power supply with output higher than 12v, let's say go with 19-22v. They'd still be able to use 25v rated polymer capacitors (35v rated polymers or electrolytics are more expensive and larger in volume, and space matters here) and OEM psu manufacturers already have plenty of 19v laptop adapter power supply designs they could quickly adapt for more power output.

Higher voltage means less current and more efficiency and less wasted power as heat when converting to lower voltages the system needs (5v for usb and ssd, 3.3v for m2/msata and some chips, lower voltages for onboard devices like network and sound, chipsets). The processor and memory already have their dc-dc converters that produce 0.8-1.2v for cpu, 1.35-1.5v for memory, each video card has its own dc-dc converter to produces the different voltages for gpu and memory chips

The regular PCI-E connector can transfer 60w through the contacts, the only limitation being the amount of current that can be transferred - with 20-22v the same contacts could probably safely do 100w so there would have been no need to resort to additional power through metal tabs/contacts

 

The only things that would still need 12v in that system are regular fans (they can change the large fan and the psu fan to a 24v version easily and run it at 20-22v) and they could add a dc-dc converter to have 12v for backwards compatibility with classical hard drives.

 

As it is now, it looks half done ... see that tiny noisy fan on the power supply as some sort of safety measure - they have the big fan moving air through the whole case yet they still have to add a tiny fan for just the power supply.

 

2. I don't like the tricks they did to add those SSD drives on the back of one of those video cards. Looks like additional complexity, two different boards. There was space on the panel with usb 3 ports to add those SSD drives there, or maybe on the back of the main board. 

 

3. Imagine how easier and simpler this PC would be if it had used HBM memory.

 

Look at the real estate used by those 16 memory chips on each video card and imagine just 4 chips around the gpu chip, basically a gpu chip that's 25-50% larger. The graphic card modules won't need heatsink on the back side anymore for the memory chips (though some metal plate would probably still be used for rigidity).

Each card would also use less power, probably saving about 10-15 watts simply due to not using 16 chips of memory anymore.

 

Look at the main board and how much space those 4 memory modules and the slots take. It will probably be a couple more years until we're probably going to see a Zen cpu with 32 GB on die and optionally one or two DDR4 controllers to add more memory if needed using 1-2 memory slots - we'd have a slightly larger cpu but maybe just a third of the real estate used by one or two additional memory slots, leaving that space to install a m2 / msata ssd or something.

 

At $4-5000, in my opinion it's too expensive and has too little real innovation, just seems like a few - arguably clever - hacks to make the whole thing fit into a shape they wanted.