 With its 6 core 12 thread core i7 processor the machine in my hands is not only more powerful than the impressively compact MSI Trident that we reviewed before it is less than half of the size The MSI Vortex G25 is a totally different kind of beast. Is it a desktop? Is it a gaming laptop with the screen ripped off? And also no keyboard and hopefully no noise or heating issues I mean is anyone really expecting us to answer these questions before we tell you that today's video is brought to you by TunnelBear? TunnelBear makes it easy to privately and securely browse a more open internet. To try TunnelBear for free go to TunnelBear.com slash LTT At a total internal volume of two and a half liters and a weight of two and a half kilograms the Vortex G25 is a strikingly slim machine. It is so tiny that you could easily hide it on the back of your TV or monitor using the included VESA mount if you didn't want to see it though honestly if you aren't totally turned off by the gamer aesthetic it actually looks pretty good both horizontally in a TV console or vertically on the included stand Though I would recommend fine-tuning the RGB lighting a little bit for the latter to keep things classy IO is curious. It's got two HDMI 2.0 ports that'll handle 4k 60 Hertz So it's VR ready, but there's no freaking display port port I mean okay, yes, there is a Thunderbolt 3 on the back that can be used for that purpose But would even a mini DP or an included dongle have been too much to ask MSI? Out of the box there was no way for Alex to hook the G25 up to the older HDMI 1.4 4k monitor on his desk while he was working on this review that said the rest of the IO is pretty solid a good mix of USB and networking and a couple of strong indications that MSI thinks that one of these would go great in your living room a digital audio out and a 12 volt DC out so that you can power a room scale VR headset like the HTC Vive without an additional wall adapter nice inside this thing is a monster it features Intel's core i7 8700 with six cores of up to 4.6 gigahertz turbo madness and a GTX 7d GPU so I'm expecting some phenomenal gaming performance in our benchmarks if That is MSI can stop that hardware from getting hotter than the seat of my pants after an evening of dining at Taco Bell gross and Good news. I wouldn't quite call the G25 silent, but from an arm's length away It's hardly noticeable with a sound quality that is easily forgotten and Our CPU leveled out in the mid 70s while maintaining a respectable 4 gigahertz on all six cores and when it comes to gaming our GTX 1070 ended up at a comfortable 1900 megahertz at 70 degrees Celsius that is right up there with a desktop card Though it should be noted that when the vortex is placed horizontally You can expect your temps to rise by about 10 degrees Now we didn't see any performance drop due to that in our 24 degree office But this could be a problem if you don't have air conditioning now It should come as no surprise that when you combine impressive hardware with impressive cooling you get impressive gaming performance and the G25 hung right in there with our standard desktop hardware test bench and While it did actually lose out to the ASRock desk mini another Impressively small gaming system it should be noted that that one costs a lot more due to its more expensive GTX 1080 graphics card and It wasn't even able to take full advantage of that card due to its thermal throttling So let's rip this thing open and have a look at the secret sauce that MSI calls Cooler Boost Titan. It's a dumb name sure, but I can't argue with the results I mean look at this eight heat pipes like MSI system team clearly took some inspiration from the Trident 3's notebook like cooling system and Improved on it before cramming it in here. It's just that instead of a regular full-size PCIe 16x GPU We get a notebook GPU on an MXM module So that is what allows the Vortex to be so slim But it also brings along the disadvantage of making future upgrades more difficult or even Impossible if Nvidia decides to stop supporting this form factor while we were poking around inside We noticed that our 16 gig RAM model had an empty slot making an upgrade to 32 gigs easy nice Then with the back screws out the top also comes off with a bit of love from a prying tool to give us access to The other side of the motherboard where you can upgrade the two and a half inch drive add another m.2 or even no way There's two more empty sodium slots for up to 64 gigs of RAM. I mean badass Book-sized workstation anyone badass. Yes cheap No as we learned from the ASRock desk mini video MXM cards cost Significantly more than their standard counterparts and this hurts the Vortex G25s value proposition The good news is that compared to similar small form factor solutions It's not that far off But the bad news is that for the 1070 model with an i7 you're looking at a cool $2,000 bringing us back to the original question Is this a tiny high performance desktop or is it a bulky laptop without a screen and a keyboard? well With this kind of performance I'm inclined to go with the former and it gets a solid recommendation if you're willing to spend the extra To save a little space on your desk Speaking of spending a little extra Skillshare is an online learning community with more than 17,000 classes in design photo editing and more if you're looking for a way to Pick up some new skills so you can afford a fancy Vortex G25 Premium membership gives you unlimited access to high quality classes from experts working in their fields and Skillshare is also more affordable than most learning platforms out there with an annual subscription coming in soon A month now since Skillshare is sponsoring this video The first 200 people to use the promo link in the description will get their first two months for free to try it out Totally risk free so go check it out So thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do But if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in The video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community Forum which you should totally join