Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I wish I didn’t need this gaming PC – MSI Trident X2”.
Are you guys ready for gaming night yeah yeah? Are you guys ready for dad troubleshoots our broken theater room night, at least that’s what would have happened if MSI didn’t sponsor me to come in on my sick day and show you guys the Trident X2, when I downgraded my gaming rig to an a770 for the Intel Arc 30 day challenge. I realized pretty quickly that none of my long distance optical cables were working on it, which means that all of a sudden I went from having a computer that could sit in a central location but be used in my office or the land room or the theater. To having a computer that was just in a central location and that’s it no way to get a signal to the other rooms in the house. Thankfully, MSI sent over this monster with an RTX 49d core I9 3900 KF and a a touch screen um. Okay.
So, there’s clearly more to this than just having the fastest Hardware. Let’S see if we can get gaming Knight back on and see if msi’s cooling can survive in a stuffy AV cabinet, is it technically cheating on the arc challenge? If I add a whole new PC to the house that wasn’t there when Luke and I made the switch to Intel, that’s going to be for the judges to decide just kidding. There are no judges or points because everything in this challenge is made up just to frustrate me, so I’m not actually allowed to keep this thing, but I do get to experience what 4K 120 hertz projector gaming would be like on the fastest machine. Money can buy and then experience the disappointment of ripping it away from my adoring children uh.
Let’S take a closer look, starting with what the heck is going on with this screen here. Once we get past the fancy boot animation and get to the desktop it’s full of all kinds of interesting things, temperatures frequencies fan speeds and even an FPS counter, which I have my doubts about whether it would be accurate or not. But I guess we’ll see soon enough. Oh wow, look at that hey, it totally does work huh.
It shows you what I know. Msi calls this thing: the HMI 2.0, it’s four and a half inches has a resolution of 480 by 800. Allows you to adjust input and output volume you can set shortcuts to launch games and gaming mode switch power profiles free up Ram, which is not necessary by the way, but hey you can do it and you can control your RGB. What I’m interested in, though, is changing it to a custom video no way.
Ah, that’s so cool, that’s not really the most practical thing, so I’m gon na switch back over to hardware monitor mode and I’m going to focus on temperatures and then let’s get a stress test running and see how high we can push this thing. Let’S give her 20 threads of prime 95 small fft, what we’re really going to do while we wait for it to heat up, is unstuffyify this cabinet truthfully! It’S not that bad, because I did know that I was going to be putting some pretty high performance stuff in here when I designed the cabinet. These meshes are quite open and all the shelves are actually mesh as well with the idea being that air would kind of be passively drawn in the bottom, and then we could exhaust it out the top. But if we don’t actually have any fans, then we’re not really going to be exhausting anything, so that’s where these noctuates come in, how to actually Mount them, though, is another question in a perfect world, we would want large fans spinning out a very low RPM, so That, if we can hear them, it’s a very low hum and unlikely to be audible over the sound of the projector in terms of mounting what I had in mind, as inelegant as it might be, is to just use these silicone noise isolator grommet things that noctua Includes with their fans and just kind of hope that my two fans would kind of line up with the holes.
I wouldn’t describe this as perfect, but it’s actually surprisingly good. Oh yeah, I mean that’s not that no uh well No One’s Gon na notice that right, if anyone asks me, I’m gon na make up some audio files dang it it happened again. Ah, these shelf holders are not the right size and I I’m fine everything’s fine. Also, I think I put all these on wrong because I’m gon na have the power coming from the top. Obviously, and I went around them down here – okay, I’m so annoyed – I told them – I told them. I was like uh, hey those don’t seem right. It seems like they’re not gon na hold, and I was like oh, it seems fine.
I was like I really don’t think so. Is that even right, oh shoot! No! No! No! No um! Oh my gosh come on seriously. No, these are still in so this is good.
Oh my gosh move. Just oh okay! No stop why you fall we’re good yeah, Cable Management shelves happy get out of here. Oh, I finally caved bottom Apple TV. Why fantasian yeah? They got one of the original creators of Final Fantasy VI, which is my favorite, and he did this new game. It’S in this, like super unique, visual style like a really apparently, it’s like a really classic style RPG, so I’m super excited to play it and finally, at long last there it is power for the fans. That was that the whole point of all of that.
I think I put that one in the wrong s I’ll stop. Why? Because I have other components in here that are going to generate heat as well like there could be an Xbox or a PlayStation here down the line, not to mention the AV receiver. I want these fans running all the time, but I want them running at a pretty low RPM. So this little power brick here that I was cable managing in before and the shelves fell haha we got minus, we made things drop on him haha anyway.
The point is, this runs to a Molex connection that I’m going to be running into one of these handy dandy. Little fan Splitters. This is very old. School fan control.
What you’re looking at is, these white ones are 5 volt, and these yellow ones are 12 volt, and then I’m going to take my two Banks of fans and I’m actually gon na go five. Volt here hope that these under bolt gracefully they’re not to us. They should, and theoretically I just have to kind of cable manage this across the top, but it should be pretty tidy. Look at that.
Let’S go see how the computer’s doing and then we’re gon na throw it in here. Very nice there’s actually some other things that the screen can do MSI sent over their Optics. Mpg 321 Ur Dash QD monitor so it’s 4K 144hz quantum dot uh with a number of gaming oriented features, night vision, uh, on-screen, Crosshair, optic scope, Zoom effect and color profile. Switching, but the thing that I want to show you guys is that you can actually control the OSD for this monitor through the Trident X2 screen, why anyone would want to control it here when they can just control. It here is sort of Beyond me, especially considering that you can also use the MSI gaming intelligence app to change all this stuff with like a mouse which is faster and better, but hey, I’m sure, there’s a reason. It’S definitely different same goes for the guts.
It just takes three screws to get access to it, and it’s immediately obvious that what we’re looking at here is an Australian PC, meaning that it uses an inverted layout with the GPU on top and the CPU on the bottom. It’S also matx, which was clearly intended to help keep the size under control. I mean it’s still big, but when your GPU is the size of a small vehicle, there’s only so much you can do about that now. Msi’S take on the inverted layout concept. It’S called Silent Storm and it has three zones, the least obvious, but most straightforward zone is on our thousand watt power supply. The fan draws air in through the bottom of the case, and the only place that it can escape is out.
The back see you later heat. The top down to GPU. That I pointed out earlier is the next zone. Now I know the RTX 4090 is a massive card, but it’s not actually this big. This piece up here is a plastic shroud that MSI added above the GPU fans to make sure that all of the life providing cool air that’s coming in through this top mesh is going straight to the GPU heatsink right here.
In practice, the Shroud actually didn’t make much of a difference to cooling. Once we reached a heat soak State, we sent it over to the lab for testing, but it isn’t harming anything and shout out to their support bracket at the the rear of the card, because this thing is not going to Sag and we had no concerns about It coming loose during shipping. Finally, we’ve got the CPU Zone down here for our core I9 3900 KF, a chip that will gladly use all of the thermal Headroom that’s available to it, and ours did just that, while also managing to stay well clear of thermal throttling.
I’M also liking this super open mesh, giving the ah here it is, I kind of moved it radiator, a clear path to blast hot air out of the case. Other notable inclusions are the two terabyte m.2 SSD hidden under the GPU dual extra two and a half half inch slots for SATA ssds, two more m.2 slots, including one of them. That’S super easy to access here on the back kind of like the PlayStation. You take off the little cover and then you just plug it in right down there and an additional three and a half inch hard drive slot. If you want to add more bulk storage down the road, we’ve also got Wi-Fi 6E and two and a half gig Lan, and I guess that’s all. You really need to know: let’s go ahead and get this thing connected shoot. What on Earth are we gon na? Do if I don’t have a shelf holder that is going to allow me to put this thing in here? Well, let’s find out: oh no um, okay! This is really not my finest cable management work. It’S all that he put his at the top, and I need to be careful not to touch any of these shelves, because if I do they might fall over uh. I just want to put this in here: CPU pillows lttstore.com. Look. They look like CPUs cute. I’M also going to put this bean bag here.
So if the computer comes flying off the shelf it’ll at least hit something soft, hello, hello, oh my goodness come unplugged. Now I have hope and okay. This is not a good sign, hey, hey! There! We go! I don’t even know what happened, but for whatever reason my receiver wasn’t playing nicely and now it is so haha. Yes, yes, oh yeah, oh yeah, all right! Oh, you saw the HDR kick in there.
Hey Brandon – and this is with the house, the house lights on and you shining a light at the screen. Brandon, not bad eh. Also, this game runs so well on the 4090. I can’t even believe it.
This looks. Freaking awesome. Give me your car fight me: copper, ow, ow, ow, stop dang, it yeah pretty sick, hey, so there is absolutely no reason to use any setup other than this for gaming. At this point, oh man, I was making that look real good for a bit there ow ow. What are the cops firing at me for? Well, that’s what happens buddy.
This looks. Freaking awesome, msi’s, Trident PCS used to be so small that you could hide them away in the ceiling tiles, but it’s pretty clear with the amount of heat they’re managing and the amount of performance. This thing packs that they had to shake things up a little bit.
Oh man, crickets yeah, it’s pretty it’s pretty great. Her kids are slow, you’re. So right we were thinking about what to get our kids for Christmas. I’M sitting here going everything I as a kid could have ever possibly wanted is already in this house what Christmas! Looking pretty good MSI, it looks like gaming Knight can proceed as planned top of the line.
Hardware, good, cooling, great looking chassis and there’s a touch screen as well, and now that we’ve got the exhaust set up. Actually, oh yeah, how are we doing for temps? Oh we’re at like 65 and 72., not bad! If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy the more detailed look. We took at the theater room and all the things that had to come together to get as good of a viewing experience as we’re getting right now, foreign .