MSI like the other hardware companies didn’t have a whole lot of new hardware to show. The main tech focus was support of USB 3.1 featured on an X99A Gaming 9 board, as well as a USB type C connector (the small reversible one) on a Z97 board.
So there was a demo showing USB3:
And comparing to USB3.1:
The USB3.1 host we believe was connected to SSDs in Raid 0.
So yeah, faster USB, wooh. In all fairness, it’s impressive that it’s faster than Sata drive would be on it’s own. I mean it’s just USB so it’s hard to be that excited. I also think that the Type C connector is just a bit small and fragile:
So there was that. There was also a bunch of motherboards that we’ll show at the end in a gallery.
On the GPU front we got shown the last limited edition GPU – merely a color variant of the regular gaming GTX980:
Followed by the next one – this one to commemorate 100 million gpus:
And it’s green because nvidia. These are a bit underwhelming. I would have rather have seen a limited edition lightning to celebrate something that epic. But given that we’d rip off the colored cooler and put a waterblock on anyway just means its pretty meh.
There were more GPUs of course but nothing exciting:
The more interesting stuff was actually in the Laptop suite:
We’d already seen these in the CyberPowerPC suite with their lightly reskinned and reconfigured versions. Above is a monster laptop with mechanical keyboard, replacable/upgradable mobile GPUs and some gold colored metal wasd keys that could be swapped out for some bling.
Cherry MX red switches. Confusingly this beast is called the Titan SLI, even though it uses GTX980m GPUs instead. At least the SLI part was right:
The screen is enormous at 18.4″ but is only 1080p. We feel that MSI really went for a build that could completely replace a desktop. The problem is that it’s no longer particularly mobile given that its huge and 10+lbs. Of course it’s not very mobile so you wonder if you’d be better off using a small and cheaper LAN rig with a better screen and more future proofing. I mean it’s cool, but I can’t see who would ever actually buy one.
We also had a USB3.1 demo on a laptop too:
Note the RGB steelseries keyboard:
We saw the same 4K laptop we saw at CyberPower, and we saw another new one with design details on the cover inspired by muscle car hoods:
The GTX965M was also new for CES and has about 2/3 the number of cores as a 980m, and also a slightly lower clock. Still it’s a decent option for light gaming.
MSI like Alienware though decided to give the option for some serious GPU power by using a standalone box that can be docked too:
Essentially there is a PCI slot running along the back there. Inside the box is a discrete GPU, a power supply and a fan:
We love these units and think they make a ton of sense. You can get a light weight ultrabook with a decent CPU and enough battery life to last at campus, then go back to your dormroom where you plug in and start using your real keyboard/mouse/monitor. For people who are torn between a desktop gaming pc or a heavy gaming laptop, or trying to afford both, this is the real way to get the best of both worlds. Plus you can easily upgrade that GPU over time too extending the useful life of your investment.
There were also some all in one desktop units, similar to last year but now with 4K:
They were slimmer too:
While it’s impressive, I never understood the need for these.
Lastly, like Asus and EVGA there were peripherals:
A mechanical keyboard, plus a reversible mousepad with one ugly side and one less ugly side:
Then an ugly mouse to go with it:
Now to end, here’s a gallery of the rest of the suite:
