 Alright, so assuming all that worked, I am now live! Live doing something that I have wanted to do for a long time, ever since CES 2016, when I got my first look at the marvelous, the magnificent, the majestic, MSI G65 Vortex Gaming Computer. I'm going to be taking it apart, I'm going to be taking every single screw out of it, and I'm going to be reducing it to its mere component so we can find out exactly what makes this thing tick, with three camera angles! Yes, my friends, I have a dedicated close-up cam, I took all the feedback you gave me from my last livestream, where I had like the world's shottiest webcam as like my close-up, and I made it even better! So, without any further ado, let's get started! TunnelBear is the easy to use VPN service that lets you use the web as if you're in one of 20 different countries. Learn more and try TunnelBear for free at the link in the video description. Yeah, without any further ado, let's start opening this baby up. Now I actually have a full disassembly guide provided by MSI, which is funny because last time they let me see this thing, they wouldn't let me take the panels off of it even, but I'm going to try to get away with not using it to the greatest extent that I possibly can. So, here on the bottom, actually I'll get you guys a look at the close-up cam here, so here on the bottom I've got not a whole lot of much of anything to speak of, no screws, no nothing, just the power input down there. I actually really like the way they did the power input, and I'm hoping to find out exactly how they handled the cable management. It's funny, for my review of this device, they actually took it apart in my absence. I have never seen the inside of it yet, even though our review actually has internal shots, so there you go, so I'm looking forward to checking that out. Other than that, there's just I.O. There's six security torque screws on the back, so you will need something like an iFixit toolkit in order to take this baby apart, and other than that, there's nothing. See, the top is just plain, bottom's plain, front just has these plastic panels, so without any further ado, let's get this baby started. So, I've got not one, but two iFixit kits. This stream brought to you by iFixit. Actually, no, they haven't sponsored anything with us in a long time, but it's like realistically, well, like, I lose track of what camera I'm talking to. Hello. Realistically, I'm close to my knees. I mean, they sent us their kits, which I used to augment the kit of theirs that I already had and already used for everything. Actually, speaking of iFixit and them not sponsoring this stream, where is my, ah, yes, here's my other handy dandy thing from those guys, which doesn't have the pen. Why can no one keep anything where it's supposed to be? This is my handy little mat that I have where I can label where all the screws came from that I took out, but it's supposed to have one of those overhead projector pens, for those of you who are old enough to remember overhead projectors, and I don't see it. This is a permanent marker. I do not want to use that. Perhaps a dry erase marker. Brandon, could you obtain me a dry erase marker, be a dear? There's one behind you. Actually very close to you. Yes, that would be perfect. And if that one doesn't work very well, I may need a different one. Thank you, sir. All right, so, wow, that really, really does not work very well. But we're going to have to go with it. So this is a little magnetic mat that will help me keep track of my screws so that I don't accidentally lose them. Even better than a magnetic parts tray. I wish it was more magnetic. That's sort of the one thing that I could complain about, but that's okay. I'll try and give you guys a good view of what it is that I'm doing here. Sorry, my monitors for the stream are my laptop, which is next to me on my right here, right actually under the camera you guys are looking at, and then also the computer that is over there. So I'm going to be kind of looking all over the place during the stream, but I'll do my best to keep that as non-distracting as I possibly can. I'm sort of new to this whole, you know, multi-caming it myself thing. One thing I think I would like to adjust though is that camera's position above me. I think it's a little bit too wide of a shot, but I really don't know if there's much that I can do about that right now. Okay, one, two, three, four, five, and six. I hate security torques. It's one of those things where like it's bad enough you put a torque screw on it. Like I can't, it's hard for normal people who don't have a bunch of, you know, tools designed for taking apart electric gizmos. Like it's bad enough to have torques on in the first place. Security torques is just adding insult to injury. Okay, so there you go. First piece is off, so that warranty sticker is already tampered as hell. So why don't we tamper it some more? Ah, take that, MSI. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Take my warranty for it now. Anyway, that's from John actually taking it apart for B-roll in the video. But this gives us a good look at the first plastic piece that I've taken off here. So actually this one, oh, is this one metal? No, it couldn't be, could it? Interesting. I can't, I actually can't tell, which is pretty unusual for me. I think it is. No, can't be. Wait. Oh, okay, so there's a couple of, there's a couple strips here for the RGB lighting. So those are just kind of like transparent, transparent strips here. And then, yeah, actually I don't even know if there's lighting in that part. Maybe. Okay, hard to say, whatever. There, now we don't have that anymore. So let's see what else we got going on here. That gave us access to a couple of more screws here. So there's one here and here. Let's tamper that warranty some more. Yep, there we go. Boom. Come on out, you magnetic bastard. There we go. And this guy. So this will take off, hopefully, that MSI Dragon logo. And I'm going to have to make sure that I do all, oh crap, I just dropped a screw. Oh, oh, oh, there it is. Ha, all is well. Yes, for now. Plenty of time to screw that up later. So I'm going to call this next to Dragon. Dragon, hopefully someone knows what that means. Okay, that didn't really seem to do a whole lot though. I am not able to really remove anything extra that I couldn't remove before. I've got a couple screws right down here that I can access now, but maybe we can just pry off, maybe we can just pry off the, oh. All right, well that was easy. Easy up until that's it. This is the thing I just hate about, it's like I don't have an answer for them because as far as I can tell it's the only way to do like a clean seamless outer shell. But like these, oh wow, I think I just popped that right off. But these screwless designs, they have to use all these really flimsy plastic clips, you know. I think I managed to not break any though so far. These ones all look intact. That might have chipped. Actually hard to tell. These ones all look intact. Not bad. All right, go team Linus. Here we've got a little cable managed, looks like an RGB LED. So I think this actually has to sit under here. And that might have been popped off as sort of a derp when we were taking it apart and reassembling it. I'm actually not entirely sure about that. Well maybe, you know what? I think I'm wrong. I think it just sits down here. Well, like I think I said earlier in the stream, I don't actually plan to put this back together. I'm just going to send it to MSI in pieces so they can make sure that it's done exactly correctly. The other thing in here is power for that LED. So you can see there's a little lead right here that plugs into a, there you go, into a little spot on the highly custom PCB that they've got going on right here. I mean look at this thing. You've got what appears to be an MXM slot. So that would be for one of the GTX 980s. Remember these are 980s, not 980Ms. Then you've got an M.2 slot. Then you've got whatever the devil this is, looks like some kind of a support brace. And then you've got like an RGB LED thing. Haha, more warranty stickers. Oh, I'm totally, totally taking that off. Alright, so let's see if we can get the other side open here. The other one popped off kind of from the back, so where did the I, where did the I.O. even go? Oh, here it is. I thought I lost the USB port. Mercy. Okay. Alright, well this will give us a look at the other side here then. So a lot of, a lot of very similar. We've got another MXM graphics card or another MXM slot on another custom PCB. This one does not have an M.2 drive slot on it though. So you can see this one is just pure graphics card. Is it using the same heatsink or have they actually created two separate heatsinks? It appears to use, yes, it uses exactly the same cooler module. So they did manage to reuse that aspect of the design, so that's a good thing I suppose. And then the other thing that we get access to for the first time over here is the four SOTEM memory slots that are actually on a separate PCB yet again. So it looks like because PCBs are flat and not round, we're ending up with, very similar to the, well the only other trash can shaped computer, you're ending up with kind of an arrangement on the inside of these flat surfaces with actually surprisingly little wasted space in this case due to the curvature of the exterior. So check this out. You can actually see if I show it to you from this angle, and they actually didn't go quite straight round either. They actually kind of angled it a little bit in the places where they could in order to take advantage of things like the flat tops of heatsinks like this one for example. See that? So right here at the widest point, you're going to find the corners of PCBs in all likelihood. Let's see if that holds true. So over here, actually no, okay, so you've got the RAM sticking up in that case. And then I think we've got one more of those where yes, you're finding the ends of both of the GPU PCBs right here at the front. So the graphics cards then, here, just giving you guys a better look at it now that we've stripped off all the outer shell, the graphics cards are in the front with the CPU junk and RAM junk and I.O. junk in the trunk, so to speak. So there's your CPU heatsink, which I don't think I had specifically pointed out before. And here's the first hint at the nightmare that is to come. I mean, even compared to a laptop, this thing is going to be horrendous to take apart and put back together. There's one of those like awful ribbon cables that if you've ever disassembled, you know, your cell phone or your tablet or a particularly compact laptop, I'm sure you've encountered. They are very fragile and can be a bit of a pain to deal with. So now we've got all those stripped off. I need to find more screws to take apart. It looks to me as though there's got to be ways to strip off more of the outer chassis before we start pulling out PCBs. So I'm going to try. I'm not sure if this is going to work, but I'm going to try to take off this front piece right here. There we go. There's another one of those. There's one of those little ribbon connectors. It's actually got a black tape over it in this case. Whoops. OK, so put those babies right there. I'm going to find out if these ones on the bottom are the same and then I can label them all the same. I may even run out of label slots on a project like this. A couple down here. Are they the same? Yes, they are. Very nice. OK, I always appreciate that. That's something that just baffles me when I see it, where you'll have a single product and it'll have like for no apparent reason, it'll just have, you know, five different screw head types on it, for example. So you need all these different screwdrivers to take it apart and just kind of go, why? Like isn't this more work for you too? Every screw, every little tiny, oops, there it goes, every little tiny widget is a skew for you. You have to inventory it all separately. So why are you going out of your way to make my life and yours more difficult? All right, so right here we've got the power button. So that was plugged in with that little sleeve ribbon cable there. Yeah, it lights up, it does power, it slices, it dices, it's a plastic piece. OK, so we can put that aside for now. I'm also going to label these puppies. So let's see, front, fascia, shirt. OK, rock on. So let's see what we're going to do next then. Hmm. I'd love to remove more of this back piece, but I'm not actually sure how that's going to work. Let's see. So there's some screws down here. There's one, two right there. Oh, oh, look at that. This has already got some flex to it. So maybe that is just a matter of popping out those screws down there. Let's find out. People are asking why I'm taking note of where the screws go if I don't plan on reassembling it. Well, I don't know. I mean, Cliff from NSI, he might get all mad and threaten to brutally harm me if I don't put it back together. So I'm going to see if I can get away with not putting it back together because I mostly just don't feel like it. Because once I'm done with this stream, I'm done with it. I'm sending it back to them. But if they make me put it back together, then I will. I try to be a nice guy, you know, except when I'm not. All right, let's have a look here. So this is definitely looser now. See, you can see we've got we've got a lot of play in the bottom now and we've still got that play in the top. But it's also not quite ready to let go, you know. You know, like all the kids, but the youngest one and moved out of the house and mama's like, little Johnny, little Johnny, stay home. Just live with us forever. I'm not ready to let go. Little Johnny's like, Mom, I don't know why we have the same voice, but I got a girlfriend now and she really wants me to move out with her. Mama says, Johnny, you can bring your girlfriend here. I don't mind if she's a she's an ugly skank and she hates my waffles. I'll put up with her for you, Johnny. Just stay, Johnny. I think this is still attached. So let's go ahead and see if we can see if we can remove maybe the top fan will come off next. So I've got this little screw here. It's actually surprisingly few screws. Whoa, that just that just wanted to jump right off. It's like excited here, you know. And it turns out I was totally misinformed. Nick tells me iFixit is indeed the sponsor for today's video. So let me tell you about him from their 19,000 free step by step repair guides to their huge inventory of replacement parts and tools with lifetime warranty. iFixit has got your repair needs covered. And today we're talking about their latest and greatest, the all new ProTech Tool Kit. It's a completely reimagined design, which isn't to say that it's made of flubber or something. It's, you know, still metal bits and all that stuff as before in like useful prying tools. It's just better. So it's got the new 64 bit driver kit, which has 10 more bits than the 54 bit driver kit I'm using in this video. It's got a more durable case. It's held together by frickin magnets instead of like a strap, which is actually a huge improvement. It's the one that I use at home. It's longer lasting. It's easier to use and just generally faster when you like have to repair something right now. And it's got a newly designed swivel top precision driver that's actually a lot more comfortable to use. The price on the ProTech Tool Kit has increased to $69.95, but it is backed by iFixit's lifetime warranty. And if you head over to ifixit.com slash Linus, linked in the video description, and use offer code LINUS, you can save five bucks off of your purchase. So that should help you out a little bit. I mean, this kit pays for itself after you pay one person to repair one thing. So totally worth it. I love it. Two screws. Hey, hey! Just like that, ladies and gentlemen. Who am I kidding? There's no ladies watching. All right. So there's a couple things I'm going to have to do before I can properly remove this. So this... Ah, dang it. I need a flathead. I need a flathead. There we go. Okay. So this and wireless antenna needs to pop off, as does this one. So it looks like MSI has put their antenna... Oh, interesting. Oh, there's another thing I'm going to have to remove over here. Hold on. Sorry, guys. It's kind of hard to grab onto now without mashing something important. So there's another little fragile connector over here that I've got to remove. So they've put their antennas in the roof here. And then we actually also get to have a look at where the fan for the top... So this is the one fan that cools the whole thing. So we can have a look at where that fan is plugged in as well. It's right there. Hoping I'm getting you guys a good look at it. But sometimes I just have to kind of hope for the best... Oh, interesting. Okay. What we also have here... Wow, there's like four leads to this thing. Geez. What we also have here is the power for that MSI Dragon logo that they're so fond of putting on things. So hold on. Where's my flathead? There we go. Come on. Come on, baby. Come on, baby. There you go, baby. Just get off there. Okay. Perfect. All right. So we've got... Geez, no, there's even more than I thought. Okay. All right. Let's have a closer look at this bad boy. So we've got what looks like four wires for the PWM fan custom connector. We've got one wire for antenna. This is actually a metal housing around this thing. They are serious about this fan here. Holy crap. Okay. We've got another wireless antenna over on the other side. We've got those nice and separated. We've got whatever the crap this is. That's another four pin. What is that for? I will confess to you that I do not know. Because I don't see anything else up here. There's just the fan and the other side of the fan. So we've got power for the LED. We've got... Oh, hold on a second. No, I see what it's for. So this is just a cable management. This is just running over to that doodad that we connected from the side panel, if I recall correctly. All right. So that takes care of everything that that is. All right. So let's go ahead and catch up on my labeling here. So this was... Oh, crap. What was this from? Okay. Top fan. Top fan. Bottom I.O. There we go. I assure you that when I'm not broadcasting live, I am much more organized about this type of thing. As you guys can probably imagine, it is a lot of things to focus on. To be disassembling a computer, to be disassembling a computer, broadcasting a live stream and trying to keep track of, you know, all of the strange creatures that are inhabiting your building that you work in every day. All right. So the next thing we see here is that, yes, I was indeed correct. This back piece right here is being held on by this... Yeah, it's a metal brace that is securing it to a few different things. So there's the power supply. Here, let me get that centered in the frame for you guys. So there's the power supply. There's the GPU heat sinks, CPU heat sink. And then this looks like the main, like motherboard. I mean, main board is also a word for motherboard. Don't stress. So but this, yeah, it's not actually secured to that. So the power supply is secured to the main board. And then this rear daughter board is secured to the motherboard. And then this rear daughter board is secured to the power supply as are the others. So there's these L brackets that kind of go like this and like that. So the first thing I'll need to do is remove this one. Hi, can I help you? Are you streaming this? Yeah. Well, you didn't tweet out the ULIVE. I didn't? No. Oh, can you do that? Shh. Thank you. Oh, crap. I left my screwdriver at home, my orange one. So I'm actually a little bit ill-equipped. Okay. Oh, wow. Those are really tight. Let's go ahead and pull that out. Okay. There we go. I see someone saying shoes are optional in the Linus Media Group office. Actually, that's not true. Shoes are required to be taken off unless you have your indoor shoes here. So some people leave indoor shoes at the office and other people just don't wear shoes, which is their choice. Personally, I'm not into the whole no shoe thing because there's only one type of footwear I need. Okay. So this baby has, looks like, three ribbon cables, each of which are cleverly labeled, which is helpful, I guess. Let me see if I can get you guys a better look at that. There you go. So you got your L, you got your R, and you got your K1C underscore 1026026 underscore H39, whatever the devil that's supposed to mean. So let's go ahead and flip these up. Flippity. Ooh, that one's not a flip-up one. Hold on. Where's my flathead? Technically, I should be using a plastic flathead for this. It's okay. Don't worry. I'm a professional. And then this one right here is not actually the same type. This is one of those push down on it ones. So I'm going to have to lift. Lift. Oh crap. It is one of those. Well, hopefully it's only a little broken. How the crap? Oh, okay. Yeah, seems fine. Cool. All right. So let's give you guys a good look at this. So back here, you've got actually a lot of action going on. Like there's a mini PCIe card over here, which would be fairly baffling to me if I wasn't looking at their, again, very handily and cleverly labeled ribbon cables here. So this one says PCH. So that's for the platform controller hub. That means that the south bridge, so the traditional south bridge, is actually on this daughterboard. So this is really clever for a number of reasons. Number one is that it means that they don't have to try and use extensions for all of this high speed I.O. back here. Like we've got four USB3 ports, two gigabit ethernet, two HDMIs. Oh, it looks like all the display stuff is down there. Okay, so that's an audio. So that's basically what we've got back there. So instead of having all that stuff, instead of having the south bridge, which handles all of those things, let me think, not HDMI, unless it's using Intel's onboard video in some way. Don't quote me on that. Do not quote me on that. I'm actually not sure why those HDMI ports are there. But all that other stuff would be handled by the PCH. So by just having what would effectively be traces inside the PCB of a motherboard just be done through a ribbon cable like this, MSI has removed all of that stuff and they were able to make use of a tiny little bit of space inside the chassis. So you can see here, it's just this bit of space right here that lives over top of the CPU heatsink that they otherwise would not have been able to or they would have had to run extensions which could have interfered with that high speed I.O. So really very cool. Let's continue our look at this, baby. So what else do we got going on here? Oh yeah, there's a two and a half inch hard drive in here. That's another thing that would also be on the PCH. So that's where your SATA ports come off of. So again, instead of running a SATA cable internally, they've actually just got this guy. Is that just like hard line plugged in? Where is the port? What the hell? What is going on here? Oh, is it this? Shut up. Oh, very cool. So what they've actually done here, and I guess we might as well, yeah, I did say I was going to take this thing apart. So let's take it apart. I'll show you guys exactly what they did here. Again, more clever, more, wow, that's, this one's really cool. I've actually seen this before. Even in laptops, you'll typically just have like a standard SATA cable plugged into the back of a standard SATA drive. And when we dig deep enough, that is what we're very likely to find here. But with a twist. Okay. So the hard drives have a Hitachi 1 terabyte, 7200 RPM, SATA 6 gigabit. And am I going to need to remove a whole nother set of screws in order to get it this bad boy? Maybe you got it here. Yep. Okay, there they are. More hard drive screws. Don't worry though, guys. For you, I will take this as far as I need to. Messiah is not going to tell me I can't take apart their computer, freaking guys. Okay. Let's see if we can slide this off. Hmm. Yeah, there we go. So this slides out now, which gives us a look at this actually very clever little system that they've got here. So they have converted all of the, hold on, I'm just going to check my focus. There we go. So they have converted the standard SATA power and data interface into this connector. This is that connector that I didn't recognize is actually for the hard drive. Very cool. All right. So we've extracted that at this point. Let's label my hard drive screws. H-D-D. Boom. Oh crap. What were these? Ah yes. L bracket. I'm sure someone will be able to read that at some point. So that leaves us pretty much done here. Oh yeah. No, no, we're not. Okay. This is cool too. So the other thing on the PCH, so clever. I like it. The other thing on the PCH is four PCI express lanes that are handled by the Southbridge. So there's the DMI, whatever something media interface. So that's the traditional, that's replacement for the, oh crap, I forget what they used to call the link between the Northbridge and the Southbridge. Was it FSB? Can't remember. Anyway, so most of the PCIe lanes in a modern Intel CPU run off of the CPU itself, but it's also got the DMI interface to the chipset that has four PCIe lanes effectively running off of it. So that's how we were able to have a mini PCIe Wi-Fi card sitting over here on this daughter board. So everything that's on here is stuff that runs off the PCH and I'm not expecting then to find anything that runs off of the PCH anywhere else inside the system. Oh, I never did figure out what that, so one of them, yeah, one of them is labeled PCH and the other one is labeled, no, they're both labeled PCH actually. Very cool. I love that. Hopefully I didn't completely misinterpret what they did here, but I don't think so. All right. Now we are really getting somewhere. So the first thing I'm going to do is remove the rest of these brackets here. Don't want them. I don't need them. I go girlfriend. Oh, a lot more screws than I had sort of anticipated. That's okay. I will change the angle to mix things up for you guys. I'm just showing off at this point. I love this three camera setup actually. This makes it so much easier for me to just work as opposed to trying to tinker around with stupid stuff like, oh, let me grab my webcam. Oh, now I only have one hand to actually do things while I'm trying to show you guys something that's stupid. One thing I don't like about this setup that you guys actually I don't think can see in any of the angles. Actually, maybe you can see it in this one. Let me see. Yeah. This wireless Bluetooth keyboard that I'm using to change scenes, it's broken in the weirdest way. Something about the power delivery is broken on it. So we even tried replacing the battery. That didn't fix it at all. So it won't hold a charge. It won't operate on battery at all, even with a brand new one. Even with one charged in our other identical unit. Like if the battery is charged up, that doesn't help. And get this. And people are going to call BS on this. And I don't blame you, because I would too. It only works if it's plugged into the wall. I cannot plug it into a battery bank. Not even a good battery bank, not even a two amp battery bank doesn't matter. I must plug it into the wall in order for it to operate at all. And that's actually delayed the stream by another five minutes or so because I accidentally unplugged it, which unpairs it and then it kind of flakes out. So I had to completely restart everything, replug in the Bluetooth dongle, redo the... anyway. Yeah, so I have to... That's why the connector is taped in there. It would be really nice if I was able to have a wireless one like I use for the main set, but that one's paired to our camera. So I have not done that. Okay, so all those brackets are off, but that doesn't seem to help us much. Maybe I'll leave it to you guys. Do you guys want to see... Do you guys want to see... Everyone's calling BS on me. I don't even care. Do you guys want to see the CPU off first or the GPU off? No, you know what? I don't think I'm going to get the CPU off first. So forget it, it's a lie. Fine. Let's stick with this. The right side or the left side? Come on guys. Right side. Left side. Right side, left side. Right side? Left side. Which one you want? Right or left? Right or left? Damn, I hate this stream delay. Everyone's asking for the CPU. Damn, I hate Twitch chat. I'm just going to pick one. You guys are so useless sometimes. I love you dearly, but man are you guys useless sometimes. Such trolls. Such trolls. So let's go ahead. I'm going to start removing GPU screws here. I'm calling for the bottom. Free the bottom. Wow, was that it? Hold on a second. What screws hold this in? It's actually very hard for me to tell. Okay, so this is interesting. Ouch, I'm going to cut myself on one of these heat sinks for sure. So aside from the screw holding it in, I don't know how well you guys can see this. You know what? I could zoom this actually. Boop-a-doop, boop-boop. Yeah. Oh man, I love this setup. Okay. So there we go. Look at that focus. Come on baby. Come on baby. Nice. So there's the screw I just removed right there with the copper visible around it. Right next to it is a little tab that actually keeps you from sliding the GPU out even if you do have the screw removed. So I'm going to have to be really careful with this to make sure that I get not only all of the screws but also all of the little tabs that go with them. Sorry guys, I'm going to have to stall for time because I'm the most stumped that I have been so far. Which doesn't mean stumped to be very clear. That does not mean stumped. You know what? I think what I actually need to do here is remove this entire black PCB in order to get at the module that holds the green MXM graphics card. So let's have a look here. That looks pretty loose. Let's go ahead and try popping it off. Nothing to really brace myself on unfortunately. Okay. Not stressful at all. I mean it's only a $4,000 computer. No pig teal. One more screw. Oops. Didn't see that one. Okay. Come on baby. Don't tease me like that. Oh I've got a ribbon cable here. Oh shoot what is that connected to? Oh we got some ribbon cable action. So oh it's an SLI bridge. Interesting. Okay. Well that makes sense. I mean that was bound to be in there. I really thought Nvidia was going to drop the whole SLI bridge pretense at some point here. They still claim that there's some high speed communication that they do over it but that interface is really not very fast by modern standards. I mean we're talking SLI bridge came about back in the PCI express 1.0A or whatever days. Back in the age of the dinosaur when I was a computer enthusiast. Alright. Because you know the internet would have you believe that I am no longer an enthusiast. I've lost my touch you know. Whoops. Oh I'm sorry about that. People get motion sick. I'm sure they're motion sick now. Okay. So let's try and pop this other PCB off and see if we can remove both graphics cards at the same time which is funny because that's what some of the trolls in Twitch chat were telling me to do. I hate it when they're right. That's the worst. Hold on I need a plastic prying tool and I'm actually going to do this one properly because I'm a little bit worried about what I'm prying on here. Hmm. Shoot. There we go. Alright. Okay. Okay so let's pull those graphics cards off. Oh there we go. Oh thing of beauty. Beautiful. So let's put the base aside for a second here. I'm just going to put this over here. Oh they fell. Okay. Okay let's investigate. Uh. Uh huh. Damn it they scratched my laptop. Well things I do for you guys. Alright so I really don't know if I'm going to go to the trouble to remove that SLI bridge. I mean unless you guys peer pressured me into it then we would see. But let's have a look at first the more boring of the two. Really oh what the hey let's just keep tearing shall we. Okay so first I need to label these screws I took out. So these are for the GPU daughter boards. Alright. Alright. Alright I'm doing it. I'm doing it. Shut up Twitch chat. Okay. Where do we start? Let's start with the simpler one. So I'll start with the one that does not have additional stuff on it. This one appears to be just straight MXM module. So let's pull the heat sink off the GPU. That's a big beefy heat sink on here man. I mean compared to what you would normally see in a laptop but then you know with how quiet the fan is I suspect it's not getting like a whole ton of air flow. So let's have a look at that heat sink then shall we. So we've got a total of three heat pipes. It's using what appears to be a vapor chamber down here. So that spreads out the heat from the GPU so that each heat pipe sort of gets an equal amount of it to disperse. Then two of the heat pipes are connected simply to this thinner part of the heat sink assembly right here with the third one dedicated to bringing heat out to what is actually probably about I'd say 40% of the overall mass of the heat sink. Remember removing heat is basically surface area and yeah basically surface area. So that's probably given the identical thickness of the material more mass equals more surface area in this case. Interesting and you've got a little pad here for keeping the mounting pressure even I guess because you've got a lot of weight here anyway. Okay so that gives us a better look at the MXM module which unfortunately is kind of hard for me to lift right now because they're attached by the SLI bridge but you can see there's your, I'm going to screw this up, GM204 if I recall correctly. I can never remember the code names. Whatever it's a GTX980 right there and then around it is actually 8 gigs of GDDR5 memory. So I'm going to see if pulling off this heat spreader gives us a bit of a better look at that. Oh there's another warranty void to remove sticker. Ha eat it. Hey Luke you look stressed. Oh I was hoping that he wasn't stressed and that he just looked stressed but he was. Hmm so that's not popping off very easily. I hope I'm not going to need like a heat gun or anything. Oh no there it goes. Okay so let's get you guys a good look at that. So there you go there's all your thermal pads. Pretty much this entire aluminum heat spreader is covered in thermal pad material. You can see what it's for. So what would normally be a massive 10.5 inch graphics card with a cooler this thick on it is now this tiny thing. So I'm not sure if the memory modules are double sided. We're going to pull this off and we're going to find out later but there's some of your GDDR5 memory. There's a GP I showed you before and this is the VRM so that's the power delivery. Now normally, huh that's interesting. Yeah normally in a desktop computer it looks like I'm going to need a special tool for this socket tool. Nope I need a bigger one. Normally in a desktop computer a GTX 980 class card would have an external PCI Express power connector but here everything seems to come from the MXM slot. I don't know much about MXM like I don't know if it has additional power pins or anything like that. Here so I'll try and give you guys as good a look at this as possible. There you go. There you go. The SLI connector is free which gives us a great look at haha I'm going to bore you guys first. So here's the MXM slot. Here is what appears to be a PCI Express 16x slot that is leading over to the bottom PCB which we'll get to later in the main sort of bottom of the chassis. So this is the daughter board that has one job and that is you can actually see there's no traces here really. There's almost nothing going on here. So it has pretty much one job to take PCI Express 16x and turn it into pretty much PCI Express 16x. So this card has to be much more power efficient than a desktop GTX 980 would be. Alright let's have a look at the back. Wow this is a really I mean I know some of the weight is this heat spreader that's still on the back but this is a very heavy PCB. There's a lot of copper. Don't ever catch me copper. There is no way I'm going to be able to put this back together. I'm not paying close enough attention. Oh well it is what it is. So more thermal pads. There we are. More heat spreader and it turns out that yes indeedy do. There is more memory on the back. More VRM junk too. Interesting. Brandon, you ever seen a GTX 980 this big? Oh that is really small. Yeah. That's what she said. Impressive. Small but powerful and impressive. Alright so let's put that baby over there. And do you guys really want to see me take apart the other one? I mean do I really have to do two of the basically the same thing or can I just show you the differences on this one? I think I should just show you the differences and then we'll, oh sorry I'm talking to the wrong camera. I think I'm just going to show you the differences on this one and then move on because there's not a whole lot more to it as far as I can tell. I'm just going to kind of sneak a peek under there and see if maybe there's like some kind of a PCI Express hub or some kind of thing like that that's going on but it really doesn't look like it. What I do suspect is that since this is a Z170 based system each of these GPUs is only running at PCIe 8x speed anyway. So what I suspect has happened since you guys may or may not have noticed that this one actually has two M.2 slots. There you go. So those are for PCI Express SSDs so I suspect that MSI has done is they have played some clever games with this not being a real PCIe 16x electrically slot and they've just kind of gone okay well we're going to reuse a slot that we have lots of in inventory anyway and we're going to completely rewire everything and we're going to have our PCI Express hub or our PCI Express switch or whatever else it is that we have over somewhere else. And that is how they're able to get the bandwidth that they need to run two of these PCI Express SSDs. So finally these are what are they? Model MZ VPV1280. Oh SM951 so these are Samsung's older NVMe drive not the 950 Pro the new flagship. Alright so let's go ahead and put that aside for now. Oh we are running out of space. And let's get back to the main Kahuna. Let's get my fan over here, get this heat sink over here, this one over here and this one over here. Alright so now this doesn't have a lot of structural rigidity to it does it? I wonder if I can just like shooop pull the whole thing right off. I mean if I could that would probably be a terrible idea but hey it wouldn't be the first time I did something that was a terrible idea. So let's remove the CPU heat sink first I guess. Oh good captive thumb screws. Love it. Or not thumb screws, captive screws. Wow whoever put this thing together really gave it a beating around the screw holes here. It doesn't really seem necessary. There's a lot of, there's a big opening there unless they had like a powered screwdriver or something that had a really short bit on it and they were kind of trying to mash it in there. That's probably what happened actually. Okay so there you go. We are, there's not a whole lot of surface area to this. You can see actually and this is true of the GPU heat sinks as well. You can see that MSI intends to keep the airflow going through the system quite low. So they're counting on keeping the RPM of the fan low but the overall airflow high enough to cool these things very quietly. If you have a heat sink that's optimized for high RPM high static pressure fans it's going to have a much more dense fin arrangement than this one. So yeah MSI is just kind of going for gold here with what for a 6700K is actually a very small heat sink. So they're really counting on that fan to be very very efficient. Also here, so we've got the 6700K that I just mentioned. I'm not going to take that out. You guys have seen me take out a CPU a million times. I'm not going to bother risking damaging any of the pins or anything. But you can see here we've got the VRM for the motherboard. We've got, I'm going to have to figure out where power goes in at some point here. We've got what looks like another physical PCI Express 16x slot right here. We've got, oh cool, so we've got the other end of that PCH ribbon cable right here. So that's what is taking the, yep, so you can actually see the traces here. It looks like, oh hold on maybe not. Shoot, sorry I'm not sure. I thought this was the DMI interface coming off the CPU and coming down to here, but I could be wrong. Don't quote me on that. So what's interesting here though is anything mounted on this board would have to be attached directly to the CPU. So the CPU has the memory controller. So that's why your four SODIMM memory modules, in this case they're each 8 gigs giving us a total of 32 gigs, are going to be connected directly to the CPU. And then the other thing is the PCI Express controller. So that's where that comes in down there, then DMI. So yeah, there's pretty much actually nothing on there because the PCH is what has all your USB, your SATA, your ethernet and all that kind of nonsense. Cool. I hope this is as interesting for you guys as it is for me because I'm having a blast actually. This is what I wanted to do back at CES and they wouldn't let me, the bastards. Oh crap. Oh, this was bound to happen eventually. Where are these screws from? Oh, they're from the GPU. So let's label that. MXM. Boom. All right. So the top down view is actually probably good for you guys right now because it gives us some idea of what's going on with this. So this looks like a support brace for the power supply and no, that's the support brace for those other two daughter boards that have the GPUs on them. So I think we actually have to take it apart in order to pull them off and then they should slide out for us. Oh, two screws. Where's all the green stuff you promised? Hey, this computer has Nvidia graphics cards in it. I'm staying true to my word. All right. So there's those guys giving us a really good look at the power supply. So chickeny power technology, DC output, 457 watt. Just like that, eh? 37.5 amps on the 12 volt rail. But how do you plug in? Let's find out. This explains why the power connector is in the middle of the bottom like it is though, which is interesting because that's where the power supply is. It's right up the middle of the unit. Poor MSI. I am definitely not putting this back together. Far too many screws. Oh, okay. We just got a look at the... There's the ground for the chassis. So that's going to be connected to the ground prong of the power plug that we will eventually find. Someone in the chat just spelled A wrong. Can we ban that guy? Just like that, A. Like capital A. It's spelled E-H actually. All right. Sorry. I'll cut back to the angle that shows us anything cool here. Okay. Interesting. So yeah, I'm going to need some cleverness here, which is unfortunate because I don't have a lot of that. So I've got to hit this clip. Hopefully I can give you guys a better look at this. Let's see if we can. Okay. So in there, I've got kind of like a computer power supply type connector. Hopefully you guys can see that. So I've got to press this clip while pulling on it to get the... Oh, well, that was easy. Okay. So there. So there's the AC power in. So that's just wired up directly to that plug in the middle. And then there's the third prong. So that's the ground wire going to the chassis, just like that. All right. Then this is interesting. The whole power supply and this like... I'm sure the electrical engineers watching this are going to be snickering at me or whatever, but this blows me away. Hold on. I'm going to do one more thing before I talk about it though, because it looks like it is actually finally time to take off the main board. So I'm just going to pull out this PCH connector here. And oh, no, I've got to undo that ground. Oh, shoot. And I got to... I should do a round of labeling too. What the hell is all this stuff? PSU, PSU as far as I can remember. Ground. Okay. So back to that angle. Oh, oh, ball sack. Okay. Well, no, there's another thing I have to undo. I got to do these two screws right here, I think. Although I may only have to loosen them. I might not even have to take those out. It looks like they just prevent it from sliding forward. Nope, no, I'll just pull them out. Okay. Oh, no, those weren't from the power supply. These were from the PSU bracket. Boom. And then these are from the motherboard support base. Okay. Okay, for real this time. Here we go. So there it is. That is the closest thing that this device has to a mainboard. So it's got a skeleton backplate thing here that's actually attached to the mainboard with the socket hold down screws. So that's these screws right here that actually keep the socket cover on. I have never seen that before. So that's different. A lot of stuff about this thing that's different. These are the hinges that those two, they make a triangle here, so they come out like this, that the two support braces for the GPU is attached to. And then there's that PCH connector that I was trying to show you guys before, but it's kind of hard with it attached to the base. And yeah, very cool. And there's that. It's just like a standard graphics card connector, PCI Express 16x. But of course, a connector is just a physical connector. A wire is just a wire, so they can rewire it for whatever they want if they're going to go full custom on something like this. Which leads us to the thing that blew my mind a second ago when I was talking about the power supply. And this runs sort of, everyone's trying to sell us on, like PCI Express 8-pin connectors have always been something that have kind of baffled me. Because I'm looking at it going, okay, so it's rated for, I forget what the numbers are, but it's like 275 watts now versus 150 watts TDP, or whatever the numbers are. It's like significantly more. Like a PCIe 8-pin is rated to deliver significantly more power than a 6-pin. I'm looking at it going, all you've done is add two grounds. You didn't actually add another 12-volt wire. And I mean, my understanding of the capacity of a connection to carry DC current is that it pretty much comes down to the gauge of the wire and how many of them there are. And so in the desktop, we're trying to be convinced all over the place that we need these massive power supplies and all these massive wires and all these connections. And then I'm sitting here looking at this going, are you kidding me? This is the only connection between the 457 watt power supply. That's it. This is the only connection. And the entire rest of the system, this connector, this. I'm going to zoom in so you guys can grasp the full amazeballs-ness of what I'm showing you right now. This, if I could focus on it, that would be great. Thanks camera. I hate you. Well, maybe if I zoom out a little bit more, sometimes it has trouble focusing. Can you focus? I'm trying to make a point here. There we go. This powers the entire system, everything. 12 volt rail, 5 volt rail, 3.3 volt rail, all the grounds, all the GPUs, the CPU, everything. Does the whole thing. How is that even possible? So there you go. Which leaves us finally with the base. And this pretty much just acts as like a traffic control station. So you can see we've got the power just comes through there. Power goes in here. So this is what routes power to this PCIe 16x physical interface, this 16x physical interface, and this 16x physical interface. This goes off to the CPU, and then this goes off to the two GPUs. One of them goes to that M.2 slot. And then you've got all these little ribbon connectors that go to a bunch of places that I forget now because it's been a long time since I started doing this. Which I guess kind of concludes our stream. So thank you for tuning in to this complete teardown of the MSI Vortex G65. I hope you guys enjoyed it. But if you didn't, of course, you can dislike the video. That is to say if you're watching it on YouTube later. But if you did, you can like the video, you can get subscribed, you can buy a cool shirt like this one to show your support for Linus Tech Tips. You can shop at Amazon using our affiliate code, instructions will be up there. Or you can just join our community forum and like check it out, ask some questions, answer some questions, maybe even become a contrib over there. It helps us fund the forum and keep the whole show on the road. Not to say that we go on the road very often, although I did recently, I went to New York. So that was on the road and I did do show things there. And now I've kind of lost track of what I was talking about. I have a standard outro and I... Right, yes. We have other videos you can watch. Maybe check out our last live machine disassembly where I did the 7 Gamers 1 CPU machine, which we will hopefully have linked up there on the YouTubes. Thanks for watching, guys, and I will see you again next time. See if this hotkey works.