MSI Hides Their Cables And Shows Off Monitors, AI Flavoured Laptops And More
If you were impressed by ASUS’ BTF and Advanced BTF motherboards which have power connectors on the back to help hide your cables, you may be happy to hear MSI have their own version. Their Project Zero line includes three motherboards, the Z790 PROJECT ZERO, a B760M PROJECT ZERO and a B650M PROJECT ZERO, which can be paired with one of three cases, the MEG MAESTRO 700L PZ, MAG PANO 100 PZ and MAG PANO M100 PZ.
The pairing of case and motherboard make attaching your cables to the back of your motherboard somewhat easier than on a standard case. The cases should work with ASUS’ offerings if you are in love with the hidden GPU 12VHPWR connector the Advanced BTF motherboard and GPU combo offer. If you aren’t in love with the case designs, a good old EATX case should give you enough space to play hide the cable on either manufacturers motherboards.
Laptops Galore
MSI also has a strong showing of laptops at CES 2024, the Titan 18 HX is an 18″ laptop with a 4K 120Hz mini LED display powered by an RTX 4090. The Core i9-14900HX is configured for it’s P-cores to hit up to 5.8GHz and can support up to 128GB of RAM. The storage is even more impressive, with three sets of SSD slots that will support 6TB of storage and perhaps more as NVMe drives increase in capacity.
The Raider 18 HX is another gaming laptop which offers you a bit more choice, with a variety of RTX 4xxx and 14th Gen Intel processors you can configure, however it sticks with the same display as the Titan 18 HX. It being CES, there is also the Stealth 18 AI Studio Laptop which weighs a mere 2.79kg, and sports similar hardware to the previous two. It adds MSI AI Engine and MSI AI Artist software to the mix, to get you more performance for your money.
The AI Engine will change hardware settings on the fly according to the mode you chose. The Stealth also includes intelligent noise cancellation for your audio, something very nice to see built into a laptop. The AI Artist is a lot like having your own Stable Diffusion, as MSI touts it’s ability to let you create your own text-to-image and image-to-image tasks with shorter prompts as well as being able to generate words within your images. RTX 4909 AI memes here we come?
MSI Desktops, America Assemble!
The Codex series, Aegis series, Infinite series, and Vision series are new pre-built desktops which are assembled in the USA. They feature a lot of glass and custom faceplates that offer cooling and, depending on your tastes, look cool doing it. The Codex and Aegis are good for those on a budget, while the wrap around tempered glass and top of the line components of the Vision series will do serious harm to your bank account. You will get top of the line performance though!
On the smaller side, the MSI Cubi 6 1M and Cubi 6 13M Mini PC are tiny 0.826 liter Raptor Lake-U powered SFF systems. They include DDR5 and are powered by one of the two Thunderbolt 4 ports included. Even more impressive, the Cubi 6 13M supports vPro technology which is not something you see on a tiny PC all that often.
There Is A Lot More To Explore; Bet You Didn’t Expect A Gaming Handheld Though
MSI have announced the Claw, a gaming handheld powered by an Intel Ultra 7 processor 155H, which features six P-cores, eight E-cores, an additional two Low Power E-cores, Intel’s first on chip NPU and support for Intel Xe Super Sampling. The screen is a 7″ IPS 1080p with a 120 Hz refresh rate and while the controls will be familiar to anyone who’s gamed on a console before, they are RGB enhanced to give the Claw a very unique look.
The 53Whr battery is larger than what you find in other handhelds, and should give you around two hours of gaming under full workload, which should increase if you are playing something a little less taxing than Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which is what MSI is using to show off the Claw to those that visit their booth.
