THE CONCLUSION
CREATING AN all-MSI build using its latest components was a fun and relatively troublefree experience that resulted in a satisfyingly uniform look. The stealth black look on the major components helped the lighting on the fans, GPU, and heatsink block really pop, and I was particularly enamored with the relatively small footprint of the case itself.
Our benchmarks demonstrated a few interesting results as we opted to compare it to a couple of other recent Intel 12th generation builds. In both our April 2022 Intel 12th gen build and May 2022 Intel NUC build, we used the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3050 Gaming OC card, which outperformed MSI’s card by up to 20 percent in a couple of our tests, thanks to its higher core clock speed of 1822MHz compared to MSI’s 1552MHz. At just $20 more, keep an eye out for Gigabyte’s card if you’re in the market for an RTX 3050.
On the positive side, MSI’s Spatium drive lived up to its promised speeds, massively outperforming the PCIe 3.0 Samsung 980 drive in comparisons, and even outperforming the PCIe 4.0 WD_BLACK SN850 drive from last month’s Intel NUC build, particularly on sequential write speeds. MSI’s drive even keeps up with the best drives from our SSD group test in the previous issue, featuring the likes of XPG, Seagate, and Samsung.
The Cinebench score disparity was also eye-opening between the top-end i9-12900K in this build and the mid-range Intel Core i512400. The faster DDR5 RAM in this system may also have something to do with this, but given other benchmark tests, we suspect it’s negligible. If you’re doing a lot of CPU-heavy operations, it may be worth going for the more expensive i9 chip, or at least something in between. If you’re a gamer though, it’s clear that Intel’s 12th gen Core i5 chip is more than enough when paired with the RTX 3050.
What are the benefits of going all-MSI on this build? Aside from a Windows 11 installation issue that required us to change USB flash drives, it was a simple build, but we’d expect that even if we had used different manufacturer’s components. What we enjoyed most, though, was being able to use MSI’s Dragon Center software in Windows to control every element of the system.
MSI also supplied us with a GK50 LowProfile TKL Keyboard (reviewed in our March issue), a Clutch GM41 wireless mouse, MPG Artymis 273CQRX-QD monitor, and GV60 microphone—all of which could be managed from one single piece of software. On my personal PC, I run a Gigabyte motherboard, Logitech peripherals, and a Razer headset, and have so many different apps that I never bother changing the settings. It made me think about going single-manufacturer in my next personal build. See you next time!