MSI Pre-Built Bends SSDs & Boils CPUs at 100°C ($1700 Aegis R Review)

check this out see if you can see this on camera so is that visible this is going to be a fun one but not for any of the good reasons this is an msi aegis r it's a pre-built computer we spent 1750 us dollars on it and it is easily one of the worst computers we've ever worked on uh there are many things wrong with this it's not just the easy stuff like the fact that it can't breathe it's completely restricted in airflow no that would be too low-hanging the problems for this one go far beyond that msi has built a custom power profile in windows that tricks the cpu into thinking that's under 100 load even when you're transferring a file it has managed to screw up the bios settings it's installed so much bloatware that the system is constantly doing something and it even has a bent ssd so you know where this one's going before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly thermal grizzlies hydrant and cryonic thermal paste are high performing thermal interfaces for use on cpus and gpus you can bring an old card back to peak performance by replacing it and doing preventative maintenance and thermal grizzlies hydrant is ideal for water cooling and air quote for new and old cards alike cryonot paste is one of the top performing pace for extreme overclocking with cpus and gpus and has been used in several world record scoring machines learn more at the link in the description below so background on this one again thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it's got an rtx 2060 super in it it has an i7 10 700 technically it was 10 700 in the advertising but uh we got the 10700. it has four fans a gungner extremely restricted case and some other standard parts msi makes motherboards and video cards so as you would expect those are the parts they put in the pre-built system sadly though uh despite having components that are desirable like the silicon components the system is executed in such a poor way that it really feels like it's just stealing things from the greater market that could be more useful elsewhere and the weird thing is msi is theoretically capable of building a computer so we don't know what happened here this this shouldn't exist it's really bizarre anyway even outside of the software stuff like the fact that the os is nukable when you first get it because it's that far gone uh the hardware is also problematic uh internally at least it's not proprietary parts so we're a step above dell there but we wouldn't say that it's better than dial does not get that award this computer is far worse than the dell system we got for other reasons let's get started with the teardown we'll talk about the thermals gaming performance everything else and the section you should really watch is the one about bios and software set up towards the end because that's where it's eye-opening the intake if you're wondering it's it's in here this um let me just hang on does our camera have enough zoom to get the can we get a macro shot of the intake so the intake there's these little maybe one millimeter cuts in the side of this plastic panel that's where the air comes in if you're wondering no that's not sufficient and additionally there are these small cuts on the sides left and right where the air comes in so the case is not promising we've been we'd talked with msi several times over the years about taste design and um i guess what i've learned is that i won't waste my time in the future the top is ventilated it is set up without any fans uh so like i was actually gonna make a comment that a dust filter is pointless when there's no intake to pull dust through the filter except because of how closed off the front panel is it might actually end up being an accidental intake because it's kind of run in a negative pressure setup since they've choked off all access to air at the front so we'll look at that in the thermal section for the system let's just take it apart see how it looks what i'm interested in here is the build quality uh we'll talk a little bit about component selection that'll come up more in the performance section of the review but build quality is what we're looking for basics like cable management all the way up to more important things like not having loose screws in it this is something we've seen a lot recently so here is the inside of the computer we've got the vetra v5 there which actually did pretty well in our testing is one of the cheapest coolers of its performance category right now and we're actually we're really impressed or surprised that msi went with this cooler because typically you see these large brands just sort of self-branding things or rebranding things so it's kind of an interesting choice to not see an msi branded cooler there and then the card we're going to take out and look at i can't tell this feels like a plastic backplate that is very unfortunate but it's also something msi loves doing let's take the front of the case off first actually i'm more interested in this okay so this is a little bit comical but they've got uh the dust filter on the front panel here and the dust filter is behind another dust filter which is a solid wall so tempered glass plastic and now you can better see the extent of the ventilation such that it exists that to their credit is is kind of open i thought that was just going to be faked and hard plastic anyway that's not great okay we're going to start disassembling this so i'm going to use some screwdrivers from the gm toolkit on store.camerasaccess.net if you would like to grab one they're in stock and shipping now we're gonna start with taking the video card out they've run two separate cables for the pcie oh nope one single cable they fooled me i thought i thought they were wired separately one single cable daisy chained for a pcie uh we prefer to see two separate cables but this is a lower power card so it's not that it doesn't really matter for this one the higher tier cards like a 30 90 30 80 it's ideal to to run two separate cables for the power headers so the card is an rtx 2060 super as stated it's unfortunately got the plastic back plate so this not only doesn't really help with rigidity or anything but it's also an insulator as long as they've got decent enough design on the front side it won't hurt performance too much but it definitely doesn't help it will impact the thermals typically uh in the in this part of the board we've got a bunch of concentration of high heat devices memory modules vrm components things like that this will insulate and bring up the temperature a little bit uh really the the i would rather see these cards without a back plate at all than with the backplate that is detrimental to performance so this this msi this has been stupid and it's still stupid but it was really stupid on the rtx 3080. that was just defensive at least this is only a 2060. it's not as offensive but yeah i guess the learning lesson here for anyone watching is if you're looking at video cards and you're choosing between features like back plates or not just be aware that some of them are bs this does literally nothing useful that's more of a critique on the card though than the build although it is made by msi get the cables unplugged so far there are some upsides here so the upsides the mortar historically uh is a board that msi actually produces for the diy market so this isn't some random proprietary garbage so the board is normal it's a micro atx motherboard you could take this out and put it in another case you could harvest this entire system and put it in another system you could take out the cpu replace cpu uh there's flexibility here where you're basically buying just a diy computer that was that was deed by someone else i guess the the dean happened elsewhere which was msi's facility so that's a good thing it means that you don't end up with the dell level of uh unusable trash where nothing's compatible with anything so here's the board cpu and memory as assembled the memory's in the correct slots that's a good thing there's two sticks crazy right two whole sticks of ram why would you do that when you could do one and completely artificially hamper the performance so they're running a ddr4 kit of three ddr4 3000. oh funny it's actually this 8g x4 it's actually from a kit of four originally and they split it apart hopefully we can reunite these two sticks with the other two that were once in their family before msi ripped them from each other's arms to put them into different systems rather than buying a kit of two but you gotta save cost somewhere all right here's the thermal paste reveal there it is so basically full coverage the uh unevenness and the spread you see is because the veteran not because of msi but i like seeing that they applied enough pace to get it all around the ihs that's nice using the whole ihs is beneficial of course more surface area to get the heat out of one device and into another so pretty good to see you can definitely see the either either it's a difference in pressure where it wasn't mounted completely like torque's the same on all four screws or it's a cold plate flatness not gonna bother testing it on this one we've already reviewed this cooler but you can see where these two heat pipes have a lot less contact i'm gonna go ahead and say it's probably pressure um from these two screws not being fully tensioned but less contact there than the rest of the place but it's okay overall and this is one of the better pre-built coolers we've seen on a pre-built system cpu is an i7 10-700 so in this instance going with the b460m board is fine there's no k at the end of that cpu it's not a 10700k and so there's no benefit to be had from a z series motherboard so this this is also okay check this out see if you can see this on camera so is that visible so as kane pin famously said one of our videos very famously it was one of our videos after all uh it's bedding like a banana like a banana it's this ssd what the hell are they doing to it they i mean first of all you can see from how the thermal pad is squished out here and not anywhere else there's an obscene amount of pressure on that side so that's perhaps the worst thing we've seen on the build so far what is going on okay definitely contact with the thermal pad that straightened back out that i mean there's actually some risk there that there could be stress fractures either immediately or with time it didn't straighten back out it's actually it's going like up and then back down right in the middle anyway this is the worst thing we've seen so far in this build where it's just torqued to hell and kind of bending the ssd's pcb which could cause problems it worked like it was running so probably because it's solid state it'll remain fine but who knows enough thermal cycles maybe eventually it dies or something a little early overall the assembly quality is far better than i expected based on how much we hate the software in the computer which we'll talk about soon um i guess you know it's this has been on here for like the whole review at this point um so i guess at this point we can just anyway let's get to the benchmark charts and see how this thing does now after that tear down we should probably start with some thermals because that was bad looking the aegis r might have some of the worst cpu thermals we've ever seen in a pre-built computer the case is sealed the air cooler is either terrible or mounted incorrectly and in this case we know the vetrov5 is pretty good so that speaks more to msi's incompetence than anything else the power limits are way over ambitious and we'll talk about that after we get to the gaming benchmarks and the msi custom windows power plan is really screwed up and how it behaves where it tricks the system into thinking the cpu should be at 100 load and by the way the case fans are set to a static speed below their maximum in our baseline torture test the cpu attempted to maintain a 4.6 gigahertz all-core boost throughout the entire 45-minute load period which is already incorrect so that's not what that cpu is supposed to do but it began thermal throttling 41 seconds after the all-core load was applied eventually it settled on an average of 4.32 gigahertz uh which is way below what it should be and even if msi hadn't played fast and loose with the power limits thermal throttling would still have occurred within the minute long boost window there was still throttling even in the two thermally advantaged configurations that we set up one was with the front panel removed the other one was with the front panel removed in the fans at max speed but with the front panel removed the sustained average was still just 4.41 gigahertz this is an improvement but remember the cpu is trying to run at 4.6 with the fans maxed out and the panel removed the cpu settled to an average of 4.46 gigahertz still not there this next chart shows the gpu clock delta or the change from one test to the next with the gpu frequency gpu clocks over the same period revealed a similar but less extreme trend with a delta of about 20 megahertz from worst-case uh baseline task to the best case results with max fans no front panel here's a bar chart with some of the temperatures cv temperatures really stole the show here gpu temperatures hit a steady state of 72 c and hotspot temperature of 85 c but those numbers are under control the gpu is able to control its own temperatures effectively with its two fans in spite of the restrictive case design we did two further test passes one without the front panel and one without the front panel and the fans in this setup as well and we can basically skip discussing those but you can see them here where even with the front panel gone and every fan and the case spinning as fast as possible the cpu hit 100 degrees celsius after one minute this is so beyond unacceptable for the price of this computer it's it's unbelievable how poorly this is built as for gpu temperatures they at least benefited slightly from the change with a steady state temperature of 65 c and a hot spot of 76 but clearly gpu thermals aren't the main problem with this system and they might not be a problem just because the cpu is throttling so hard that the gpu isn't even getting enough instructions to run up the heat load take a look at game benchmarks for the msi aegis as a reminder gaming and the benchmarks you'll see here it's really more a factor of the gpu and the cpu which are made by other companies than it is the pre-built manufacturer so if the performance is bad it's actually just a really impressive indication that the pre-built manufacturer does horrible things to its parts when it tries to install them all right cyberpunk's up first cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p medium has the aegis r right where we expected it it's at 92 fps average and nearly tied with the 90 fps average of the hp pavilion that's another system with a 2060 super that's not a great starting point given that we paid 320 more for the aegis and the hp box or that there's a dismal two percent performance increase in this scenario for 22 price increase to be clear we're not recommending the what we call the embarrassingly bad pavilion but in a straight performance per dollar contest between just these two pcs the pavilion wins the systems we tested are frequently gpu bottlenecked in games and spending the extra money to get a 10700 doesn't make much difference in those instances the lenovo legion is the next step down on the chart and contains the same cpu as the aegis r but the legion's 1660 super puts it in a significantly lower performance tier at 66 fps average still it achieves 72 percent of the performance at 700 cheaper so there's a lot of value there cyberpunk and red dead are two of the more graphically intensive games in this suite with red dead redemption 2 showing us better scaling for the aegis r in this one there's an 11 advantage over the pavilion but msi's position on the chart remains unchanged rainbow six siege at 1080p pushed frame rates high enough to generate some impressive coil wine but that was really the only thing truly impressive about it the end result was a 255 fps average which lands right above the hp pavilion again and right behind the more expensive but far more impressive in terms of mechanical engineering beast canyon knock equipped with a 30 60. for a game like siege this level of hardware really isn't necessary a system like the abs challenger with a 10 400 f and 1660 super is more than enough as well as being 750 cheaper however if you're interested in higher frame rates the pavilion and beast canyon knock alike show that the aegis isn't anything special running with our higher graphics settings and 1440p instead the msie just ends up at 171 fps average now and that's with the lows still proportionately spaced the beast canyon nook maintains a lead although it's largely an irrelevant one it's mostly just interesting for its better overall component selection engineering and the size the form factor but it's more expensive the pavilion maintains its spot close to the aegis while obviously still maintaining its price advantage the results of our blender power test required some explanation this time depending on bio settings the intel cpus typically show an immediate power spike in consumption when the test begins followed by a sharp drop-off as the tau period expires and the cpu settles to its long-term power limit msi opted to set that 255 watt constant limit so the drop-off never happened instead the system's power draw maxed out at 275 watts and then dropped down to an average of 264 watts as the cpu began to thermal throttle again after 30 seconds compare this to the legion t5's 10-700 which didn't thermal throttle and therefore outperformed the one we're looking at from msi and that system dropped down to 102 watts after the initial boost period our gaming benchmarks are shorter lighter cpu workloads than blender is so we didn't encounter any thermal throttling during this portion of power testing we did encounter some of the highest full system power draw numbers we've seen in a pre-built so far with an average of 345 watts in rainbow six siege and 357 in cyberpunk that puts it on par with the much higher performance and higher spec skytech kronos which means that msi is extremely inefficient in its performance moving on to setup and instructions the remove foam warning on the side of the case is clearly visible so that's nice and unlike iowa power msi actually put some foam inside the system is housed in an mpg gungner110r which is a case that comes with four 120 millimeter fans and a big pane of glass to make sure they can't do anything useful msi makes other variants of the gungner several of which are better ventilated but it seems like those models rarely make their way into aegis systems they wouldn't want to accidentally make a good computer so we can't fault them for that the best thing we can say about this case is that it's easier to get the front panel off than it looks so cleaning the front filter isn't a hassle but you'll also never need to clean it because the fans don't pull anything in in addition to the usable but not exciting mouse and keyboard the accessory kit contains a power cord sata cables and wireless antenna with systems from sis that don't manufacture their own parts we get practically every loose bit of paper and hardware from the retail boxes of various components but because msi can source parts directly from the factory we're missing the usual manuals driver disks and spare case screws it's not really a big deal but it isn't convenient for anyone who plans to do their own maintenance or upgrades in the future we received an i7 10 700 rather than the 10-700 f we paid for which is a nice bonus we've seen this kind of part substitution based on stock before where if you buy a pre-built it's definitely worth checking each component against the invoice to see if anything has been altered this isn't the first time we've had that happen in this case it was an upgrade though the 10700 igp isn't incredibly useful compared to the discrete 2060 super that's included but it does allow using intel features like usb or connecting displays to video ports on the motherboard for troubleshooting so that's good time to talk about software and bios xmp was not applied in bios so the provided memory ran at 26.66 the vast majority of people we've tested don't come with xmp enabled even when they do list the xmp frequency of the spec sheet one defense for not enabling xmp is that it's technically overclocking and would theoretically avoid intel's warranty assuming they cared enough to check and treated the manufacturers the same as the rest of us but that argument doesn't hold any water with pre-built if the system blows up in any capacity it's getting returned to msi not intel this is lazy and pointless and we're tired of fighting this fight msi clearly isn't omitting xmp out of some desire to keep the hardware safe or to obey intel guidelines because if it were it wouldn't be toasting cpus at 100 degrees celsius and it wouldn't be customizing the power plant this is obviously just laziness or stupidity we're not sure which one but it's definitely not to protect the parts when testing pre-built systems we select the high performance power plan in windows usually systems ship with the default balanced plan but with the loads we use for testing it really doesn't change much and selecting high performance is just consistent with our cpu and gpu testing in the case we want to cross check results we made an exception for this msi system because it included a mode called ultra performance which the system dynamically toggles on when under load far be it from us to stand in the way of msi screwing itself over so we left that one on during sustained lightly threaded workloads like transferring a large file ultra performance toggles itself on that's when you need it apparently and it tells windows to pretend that the cpu is at 100 utilization what this does is it causes windows to incorrectly report 100 load on all threads hardware info for example continues to show the true load which is barely anything because of this the cpu runs at its all-core turbo speed of 4.6 gigahertz but this is actually lower than the 10-700 max single core turbo of 4.8 gigahertz since i'm a size default settings have pl1 and pl2 set to 255 watts or in msi terminology liquid cooler uh it sustains that the all core 4.6 gigahertz speed should last for as long as the file is transferring this means that the cpu package temperature could hit steady state in the mid 60s celsius just from dragging and dropping a file and it's not even allowed to hit max boost msi proves that you can not have your cake and not eat it too but it doesn't end there norton is here as well it's stepped up its game this time with the antivirus presence typically this pre-installed anti-virus package would be just adword that exists to sell itself and norton's no exception from how others work but it did go above and beyond this time and it did so by blocking a simple batch scripts that we use to move results files it also let us know that every file involved in a steam install was safe one at a time literally one at a time it also gave us a warning about high disk usage because if anything can make you feel better while your system is chugging with a hard drive pinned at 100 load it's a friendly pop-up from norton we found norton to be even more obnoxious than mcafee here and that's really saying something there's plenty more pre-installed on this system too there's an app called duet display that tried to set itself up on first boot and has launched its startup ever since there's tons of msi rgb related processes there's the msi voice control service maybe they're listening to this review before we publish it anyway there's also uh because we made the mistake of opening it one single time the ever present xbox app but that's more of a microsoft's fault the first time we booted the system it spent a few minutes applying windows updates despite having not been connected to the internet or lan at all it apparently went out the door with some updates downloaded and cued but not installed which is just bad attention to detail the pre-installed nvidia driver was 466.27 which shipped in april 2021 as did the bios version installed on the board those are more recent than we typically see in pre-built especially given that the os appears to have been installed in july and the system shipped to us in october and we started using it december of last year so points to msi here for keeping things up to date so concluding this one then we normally do just some quick bullet points for the conclusion and then i mostly ad lib it because we're experienced enough working with the product by the time we get to the end that it's easy to figure out what to say well this one the bullet points are even simpler than normally we have two sections one's called good ones called bad and under bad it just says bad so that gives you an idea of where we are with this awful thermals 100 degrees celsius on the cpu the gpu is dropping clocks a bit as well this is totally unacceptable for a system which is pre-built the entire point of pre-built is that they don't make these types of mistakes because they control every component in the system that's the whole point it's all controlled so you don't have to worry as a customer if it's thermal throttling or not so that's already insane the power limits they've set for the cpu make no sense for the cooler that's on here the windows power profile it behaves like a power virus so that's not good either norton behaves like a virus as you would expect and then there's the other stuff on there we talked about that is intrusive too so thermals are bad uh very inappropriate combination of the cpu cooler with the bios settings for the cpu the veteran v5 is a pretty good cooler we've reviewed it we liked it overall but it's not supposed to be paired with like 200 watts that's not the thing it's for so what the hell msi you make liquid coolers you could have msi has set the power profile on this to a setting that msi in its own bios calls liquid cooler instead of using a number they use the word liquid cooler and then they put an air cooler on it and not even a particularly high-end one so obviously the conclusion is don't buy it under the category of good we wrote these notes the software and bios is up to date and um that's it so there's another note that says no obvious flaws in assembly but then we saw the bent ssd so almost no obvious flaws in assembly the biggest upside is no proprietary parts so worst case scenario you could buy this hopefully on the second hand market because someone realized it's not very good and then strip the parts out of it and use them in something you build yourself where you install your own os that's not bloated and filled with trash and you use a case that doesn't suck and a power limit that's appropriate for the cpu cooler then you would have something workable but even the hp pavilion that we reviewed which we don't recommend either by the way that would be a better buy than this uh the intel nux that are just really good mechanically engineered small form factor boxes they're expensive but those make far more sense than these do despite the price of the nux there's plenty of it skytech and abs have had good options we've looked at cyberpower has options that are better than some of the ones we've looked at those would be worth considering but even you buy from cyberpower either power we've had problems with both of them from dell we've had problems with but you don't get something quite this bad most of the time this is a combination of things that each of those companies has done bad independently except it puts them all into one box so don't buy this it's garbage that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more stories you go to store.camerasnexus.net if you'd like to help us directly with reviewing this type of thing or patreon.com and um yeah i don't know we'll figure out what to do with this one it's a dumpster out there so don't worry we're not actually going through it we'll give it to someone in pieces that's how it's better all right see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 962,975

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, pre built pcs, pre built gaming pcs, prebuilt pc reviews, best prebuilt gaming pcs, msi aegis r pc, msi aegis r prebuilt gaming pc, msi aegis r review, msi aegis worth it, msi prebuilt pc worth it, msi aegis r benchmarks

Id: TpTrrIsMGXU

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/-Venser-]

Why is it so hard to make a competent prebuild?

[u/-protonsandneutrons-]

MSI might have more background services that muck this up, but FWIW, the "Ultimate Performance" plan was designed by Microsoft to "reduce micro-latencies" in workstation systems. It more or less disables all CPU idle states, e.g., meant for well-designed professional systems.

How on Earth MSI thought enabling that (minimum CPU 100%) was the right decision here is hard to fathom. That case + cooling solution is cooking itself.

[u/Kougar]

Wait, are you telling me bending the SSD in half to reduce size isn't how one compresses their data???

[u/Michelanvalo]

So I don't get it. If the front panel actually makes no difference what is the issue? We know from their other testing the Ventroo performs better than that. Are the front fans are just trash? Is it really the motherboard and power profiles being that trash?

[u/-Suzuka-]

Wow, what a dumpster fire.

[u/SirWhoblah]

It would be nice if at least one of the people designing these prebuilt actually used them for a serious amount of time