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Excellent Mid-High End PC for Gaming & Productivity
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This is just about the best PC you can get for this price point and the parts inside. As the other reviews have stated, the CPU is air-cooled. The cooler is a one fan (didn't see a brand name as I haven't gotten around/needed to remove the cooler yet) with heatsink air cooler that is just enough to keep the i7-12700KF cool, but just barely.
I highly recommend undervolting the CPU to help keep the temps in checks. I personally went into the BIOS (BIOS is standard MSI fare) and:
- Set Voltage Type to "Adaptive+Offset" - Voltage to 1.250 V - Set Offset Type to "-" aka negative - Set Offset to 0.150
This will SIGNIFICANTLY reduce the heat produced by the CPU and allow the cheap air cooler to the succeed in keeping the CPU at around 60-75 C while gaming and even under thermal limit in Cinebench r23 at around 80-85 C. Five runs back to back did get me up to 90 C, but this is massive CPU benchmark which is FAR MORE load than the CPU will take during gaming. The CPU maintained a boost clock of 4.7GHz on P-Cores and 3.8GHz on E-Cores post underbolt, but you may need a better cooler if you plan to overclock the CPU (which will require more voltage on the high end).
In Destiny 2 at max settings at 1440p, I was getting 140-200 FPS (it's a highly variable game, but the average was around 160-165, sitting nicely at my 165hz monitor's limit). I also tried World of Warcraft and also got framerates in the 150+ range when in outdoors areas, 90-100 while dragonflying, and an impressive 60-70 in Valdrakken (a main city with 100+ players, NPCs, etc...WoW's engine is old and it takes A LOT to run that well in a city).
My unit did not come with XMP enabled however in BIOS, but it's a quick change within the "OC" area of the BIOS and is actually right above the voltage setting mentioned before (MSI Bios is accessed by pressing the DELETE key during start-up).
GPU Temps seem stable so far with 50-60 C being pretty common and higher in hot spots, but this is nowhere near thermal limits.
The system also runs pretty quiet with out of the box fan curves with the undervolt applied. I can barely hear it with my headset on and there's zero noise heard while gaming, though you could pump the fans up to max and work on overclocks the kind if you wanted. There is an exhaust fan wire with poor cable management (at least on mine) that ended up sliding into and bumping up against the rear fan which made a bit of noise, but I managed to tuck it away, but you could even reroute it behind the board if you really felt the need.
Memory which came with mine was XPG branded, two sticks of the 8GB 3200 MHz RAM slotted into the 2 & 4 slots of the board, correctly.
The case is better than the older/cheaper MSI 110R Gungir as the 120R (the listing incorrectly lists it as 112R) has more mesh on the front which allows some actual airflow with the three front fans. There's a small mesh port on the bottom for the PSU and a mesh top which doesn't have fans attached by default, but can fit a 240mm radiator if you plan on switching to liquid.
SSD is an ADATA drive, but from my experience so far, it's fast. Windows 11 prepped in under 2 minutes (aside from me reading through Microsoft's constant offers for Office lol) and restarting the PC takes only about 5-10 seconds. The only limit you'll really have downloading and installing software and games is your own internet speeds.
The only downsides I'd really say are the minor cable management issue, thermal performance of the air cooler being a little borderline without undervolting, and...Bloatware. There's not a lot of bloatware, at all really compared to some pre-builts, but Norton Anti-Virus and MSI Center come pre-installed. I personally suggest uninstalling Norton, getting yourself the free version of Malwarebytes, and let Windows Defender protecc as it's very good nowadays. As for video drivers, simply go to Nvidia's website and download them manually, no need to use MSI Center at all.
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TOP CRITICAL REVIEW
Good, but..
Great specs and build
Worked amazing for 3 days and then completely froze and bluescreened on me. It got progressively worse to the point where it would just freeze on startup. Definitely a hardware issue. Just sent it back today, hopefully I dont have any issues with my replacement. Will updates
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