MSI crams a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti into a slim and 'savage' gaming PC

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MSI is figuring out how much high-end hardware it can stuff inside a 10-liter chassis, and with a new round of graphics cards from NVIDIA and processors from Intel, it's apparently quite a bit.

The new Trident X is the latest iteration of MSI's compact gaming desktop, and also the most powerful. It features processor options from Intel's newly minted 9th generation Core family, and specifically the two 8-core options, the Core i9-9900K with Hyper Threading and the Core i7-9700K without HT. Intel also released a 6-core/6-thread Core i5-9600K, though there's no mention if that's an option on the Trident X as well.

For gaming and graphics, MSI is offering the Trident X with Nvidia's recently announced GeForce RTX series, including the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070. All three cards wield dedicated RT cores for real-time ray tracing, though we won't know what kind of performance impact enabling RTX has until we're able to test the feature on RTX-supported games.

Interestingly, MSI has chosen to outfit its Trident X with a motherboard based on Intel's now-previous generation Z370 chipset instead of utilizing Z390 hardware, according to the spec sheet. This might be a cost saving measure, or simply due to timing. On the plus side, there isn't a big difference between the two chipsets. It mostly comes down to connectivity, with Z390 gaining native USB 3.1 Gen 2 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi support instead of offloading those chores to separate chips. Even so, the Trident X supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi out of the box.

For storage, the Trident X sports a single M.2 port supporting both SATA and PCIe SSDs, and two 2.5-inch hard drive bays. It's not clear what specific storage configurations MSI will offer.

The Trident X will be available in November starting at $2,299.