 My first exposure to the Aegis Ti barebones gaming desktop from MSI was through this article on Tom's Hardware. And I'm not sure why, but I thought for some reason that it was a compact SLI gaming desktop. So when it arrived in a box the size of a small car, the only thing I could think was, well, I hope MSI has packed a lot of innovation in there, because if the computer itself is that big, this thing is going to be pretty hard to recommend. Cooler Master's MasterCase Maker 5 features their freeform modular system, allowing you to customize, adjust, and upgrade. Make it yours at the link in the video description. Let's start with the good news. The Aegis Ti is very well packed inside that enormous box. So while it's not really any smaller than I'd expect a typical MATX computer to be, it's also not larger to the point where I feel like the engineering effort that went into creating its non-standard internals was a complete waste of time. Maybe. We'll see. And I suppose that there are aesthetic reasons for it too. Whether you generally like the gamer look or not, you're likely to agree that the Aegis Ti is striking. The front, along with its solid I.O. mix, including a DVD drive, two USB 3.0 10 gigabit ports, one type C and one type A, a USB 3.5 gigabit port, audio jacks, and an HDMI passthrough for VR, rocks an RGB-lit, aggressively postured design whose helmet-inspired grills, windows, and emblems work together shockingly well. The top and sides are no different with ample cooling vents, a GPU window that shows off the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X cards that I installed in SLI, and a solid metal carrying handle being the standout features of the box that sits on top of the bottom pedestal that contains the included 850 watt 80 plus platinum power supply and two 3.5 inch hard drive bays with pre-wired SATA power and data cables. In terms of rear I.O., we've got a pretty bog standard layout here, with the PS2 port being a welcome inclusion. Let's go inside, because from out here, it's hard to say much about why MSI felt the need to do anything to the standard MATX layout in order to fit two graphics cards into a machine this size, and because my unit is a barebone, so we won't be doing anything else with it until we open it up and install a CPU, RAM, drives, video cards, and an operating system. So it turns out, the answer to why they needed to do that is not ease of use. For a barebones with a custom chassis and motherboard, this thing is really not very easy to build in. Some stuff is handled well. Two of the DIMM slots and the two M.2 SSD slots are crazy easy to access from the side. The hard drives in the bottom foot have the cables pre-run, and the single 2.5 inch SSD on the side, though it annoys me that they didn't include hardware for the two others, can be installed in less than a minute. But the other third and fourth DIMM slots are on the other side of the motherboard, making them awkward to reach with the CPU cooler radiator installed, though that's honestly the least of my concerns, because you'll need to remove this entire bracket, which interestingly seems to have enough room for a dual-rad, if you wanted, to install your CPU anyway. So, poor cable management and a lot of things needing to be moved out of the way is my biggest complaint down here. Which leads us then to the video cards. They look simple. Slide the video card in this way and oh, wait a second. Those aren't thumb screws. How do I get a screwdriver in here? Oh! So I have to undo these two screws for the top fascia, undo another five screws to open up this hinge with the fan attached to it, then I can slide the optical drive forward to make room to put the graphics cards in, finally install them, plug in the, again, poorly cable managed cables for PCI Express power, plug in the SLI bridges, and then jam the optical drive back into place and close it all up again. I just don't think that any of that would be very intuitive for a new system builder, and in some ways, I think it would be even more difficult than building a standard system from scratch. It's little things, like the inclusion of these ridiculously long SLI bridges, instead of a proper high bandwidth hard bridge that's already at the right spacing. With MSI's own video cards installed, I'm forced to either have them stick up and mash against that top grill, or go down and catch in the fan. Stuff that doesn't look like it should go together can be very confusing for the target audience that I would think MSI is trying to hit with a barebone system, and the bottom line here is that 11 screws is too many to swap out the graphics cards. Compare that to Razer's core, which is tool-less, though it should be noted my thumbscrew was too tight to remove by hand out of the box, I ended up needing to get a screwdriver, and this feels like a design from yesteryear from a user friendliness perspective. And while we're at it then, I might have suggested straight HDMI connectors for that VR pass-through thing. Firing up the BIOS, more lack of polish. I remember seeing MSI P67 boards that had a more elegant UEFI interface than this one. The worst offender is the legacy boot mode being grayed out and not working at all in my shipping BIOS without doing some configuration gymnastics, and I sincerely hope to see some improvement here in the future. With that said, with the actual assembly complete, the story gets quite a bit better. Cooling performance is wonderful, and this system with its four 120 millimeter fans is really quiet. CPU dye temps in the neighborhood of 70 degrees even in a toasty warehouse on a hot day with the 400 megahertz factory overclock enabled by that big dragon button on the front is nothing to sneeze at. And the way that MSI has separated my open air cool GTX 1070s from the rest of the components means that GPU boost speeds averaging over 1800 megahertz in real world applications were easily achievable. So I was running Crysis 3 at 4K in SLI for the duration of this test, which I guess leads us well into performance then. If you've seen a slightly overclocked 6700K with GTX 1070 SLI, none of this is going to surprise you much, but I think the bigger conversation here is about whether SLI makes sense at all right now with the GTX 1080 capable of handling pretty well anything you can throw at it and the future of multi-GPU pretty clouded right now with the implementation being largely up to game developers as they switch over to DirectX 12 and Vulkan, which you can learn more about here. But I guess that's the tactic here from MSI. If the customer wants tiny gaming and is willing to settle for a single GPU, they've got that covered, but if they want no compromises, they offer that too and at a much more palatable price premium compared to some of the bare bones that we've checked out recently like Zotac's Magnus N980 for $1600 and MSI's own Vortex for that matter. So the age STI is 650 bucks for a well ventilated RGB lit case, a decent 850 watt power supply, a Z170 motherboard, and a liquid cooler. 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