Previously showcased at CES 2016 show in January, MSI has now announced that its cylindrical Vortex gaming PC is available, starting at US $2,199 and packing quite a punch in its small 6.5L case which has a design that is quite similar to the Apple Mac Pro system.

Currently, there are two SKUs mentioned by MSI, both based on Intel's Z170 chipset, Core i7-6700K Skylake CPU, and two 128GB PCIe Gen3 x4 SSDs in RAID paired up with 1TB SATA 7200RPM HDD. The difference between those two is in the amount of memory and the choice of graphics card.

The base, US $2,199 priced SKU, comes with 16GB of DDR4-2133 memory and two GTX 960 3GB graphics cards. If it sounds strange, bear in mind that these appear to be Geforce GTX 960 OEM graphics cards with GM204 GPU, 1280 CUDA cores and 3GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 192-bit memory interface and not the normal GTX 960 desktop graphics cards.

The more expensive, US $3,999 priced SKU, comes with 32GB of DDR4-2133 memory and two GTX 980 8GB graphics cards in SLI.

Both graphics cards appear to be MXM versions so specifications are still a bit unclear.

In case you missed it earlier, the MSI Vortex comes with the 360° Silent Storm Cooling system, a center placed system which draws the air from the bottom of the case and pushes it over components and out through the top of the case, same as on the Mac Pro system. It appears that it does a good job in keeping both the Skylake CPU and two GTX 980 graphics cards and MSI promises that it will produce under 37dBA of noise at full load.

The rest of the specifications include Killer DoubleShot-X3 Pro chip with dual Gigabit LAN and 802.11ac WiFi, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI and two DisplayPort outputs and a 450W 80Plus Gold PSU.

Both MSI Vortex SKUs have already showed up in the US and hopefully we will see them in Europe soon as well.













Source: MSI.com.