MSI Aegis Ti3
Mean machine makes a mega impression.
We’ve taken to calling the Aegis Ti3 ‘Optimus Prime’ around the office, though perhaps ‘Megatron’ is more appropriate with those angular features and red and black styling, but we can’t hold that against it — especially considering the power locked inside.
The Ti3 marks the third generation of MSI’s Aegis gaming desktops, and this iteration updates the system with an Intel Kaby Lake processor — a 4.2GHz Core i7-7700K, with the turbo raised from 4.5 to 4.8GHz. Also slotted in the MSI Z270 motherboard is a ludicrous 64GB of DDR4-2400 RAM — an absurd amount.
The result is solid scores in Cinebench R15 (1,032) and Tech ARP’s x264 (23.22fps), though x264 crashed the first few times we tried running it. Apparently, the factory CPU bump was only done to the clock speed, not the voltage, resulting in some instability under heavy load. It was only after bumping the voltage up a tad that the test completed without a hitch.
On the storage front, a pair of M.2 drives in RAID 0 amount to 1TB of NVMe SSD space for all your games, programs and OS, while a 3TB HDD takes care of media cold storage. But what the SSDs have in sheer size, they lose in performance, falling short of our zeropoint in CrystalDiskMark x64’s 4K read and write tests. PCMark 8 Creative wasn’t too affected by the drive access, producing a healthy overall result of 9,489.
But Aegis Ti3 is a gaming system first and foremost. To prove it, pixel-pushing is handled by a pair of GTX 1080s in SLI. We’ve had some issues with SLI performance in the past — especially at 1080p — but things are considerably better now, due to updated drivers. We performed testing on Nvidia’s 378.78 drivers, which added SLI profiles for a handful of games, as well as optimisations for DirectX 12. The latter proved considerably helpful in Rise of the Tomb Raider. With it enabled, the Aegis Ti3 landed some of the best scores we’ve ever seen. At 1080p max settings, the Ti3 averaged 166fps across the game’s three-part benchmark. 1440p and 4K performance was just as impressive, averaging 151fps in the former and 87fps in the latter — both at max settings. The Division fared similarly, with 140fps at 1080p, 105 at 1440p, and 65 at 4K. Those numbers were without DirectX 12, though, because enabling it resulted in knocking our frame rates down by around 30%. Continuing to be one of the most difficult games to land a high frame rate at lower resolutions, Far Cry Primal scored 88fps at 1080p and 87 at 1440p max settings. 4K wasn’t much below that either, with 72fps — again, with settings at the highest preset. Lastly, 3DMark Fire Strike returned excellent scores: 24,134 for the regular 1080p test, 16,074 at 1440p, and 9,115 in the 4K gauntlet of Fire Strike Ultra.
All told, the Aegis Ti3 is an incredibly capable gaming machine. Though a bit odd to look at, it’s actually quite compact considering how much is inside. The carrying handle is a nice touch, too, making the system easy to tote, despite its weight (14kg). But hopefully you’re happy with the insides — as according to stickers on the back panel screws, opening the case violates the warranty.