MSI Trident 3
Is it getting hot in here?
No bigger than a PS4 Pro or Xbox One, MSI’s lounge room friendly Trident 3 is one of the most svelte mini gaming PCs we’ve ever tested. Its compact parallelogram-shaped chassis means it’ll easily fit on a shelf in your TV cabinet, but the included stand (which is less stable than we would have liked) gives you the option of flying it vertically as a tower.
Spearheading the Trident 3’s list of specs is a 7th-gen Intel Core i7-7700 CPU, although that’s running on a slightly older 6th-gen entry-level H110 chipset-based motherboard. This slightly Frankensteinian component arrangement will mean that some of the additional features and upgrades offered by that newer i7 chip will be unavailable.
Adding fuel to this fire, the CPU cooler doesn’t seem up to effectively cooling that CPU, maxing out HW Monitor’s temperature gauges with readings of 100ºC, even when only under partial CPU load. These temps sit at the upper limit of what CPUs can handle — the result is that the CPU will automatically be throttled down to try to let that excess heat dissipate. In the long run, CPUs regularly operating at the top of their temperature range can suffer from decrease lifespan and, moreover, the heat they put out can even damage surrounding components.
If you can look past that (somewhat perplexing) flaw, there’s a lot to like about the Trident 3. Leveraging the performance and efficiency boosts of Nvidia’s latest Pascal GPU architecture, the Trident 3 is fitted with a VR-ready GeForce GTX 1060. This GPU is supported by a slightly low but acceptable 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SATA-3 SSD and a 1TB HDD, so its raw processing-power easily puts Microsoft and Microsoft’s current gaming consoles to shame. The cutting edge components of the Trident 3 are even a generation ahead of Dell’s $1,500 Alienware Alpha.
In testing, the Trident 3 easily dominated the Alpha and its GTX 960 GPU across older titles on 1080p Ultra settings, churning out 133, 114 and 87.5 frames per second across our Tomb Raider, GRID 2 and Bioshock Infinite benchmarks, respectively, compared to the latter’s 84, 87 and 70 respective fps scores.
The Trident 3’s CPU managed to pin benchmark scores of 19.9 and 849 on the CPU-focused HWBOT x265 1080p media encoding and Cinebench R15 multithreaded CPU benchmarks. The Trident 3’s scores are reflective of some CPU throttling, when compared against the scores of the Alpha’s core i7-6700T CPU scores of 14.5 and 650 on the same tests, but the end result was pretty negligible.
If that CPU didn’t get quite so hot, we’d already be mentally rearranging our own TV-cabinet to fit in this $1,799 unit (which includes an accompanying Stratus XL controller and For Honour game code). But the potential long term consequences of that hot-running CPU are enough to make us reconsider — and wishing for a slightly cooler-running Core i5 version.