Well, I pulled the trigger on a new computer. Should be here in a week or so. Just like my old computer, I’m looking for something that will get me through around four years or so. I’m pretty happy with my current rig (i7 4770k and a 1080) and could probably wait a bit longer, but hey…when you get the nod you sort of act like the Pentagon and spend the money.
I’m going to be doing a lot of traveling in the next few years, so I wanted something far more portable than my old Cooler Master tower, which has served me well. I actually really wanted to like the Lenovo C730 Legion cube design, but I dug into scads of reviews and there seemed to be some concern about performance, throttling, and heat. It also maxes out at a RTX 2080 and I wanted to pay the premium for a 2080 Ti. Yeah, yeah, I know.
Poking around a bit more (for days) I finally settled on an MSI Trident X Plus 9SF-054US.
- Intel Core i9-9900K
- RTX 2080Ti Ventus 11G OC
- 32GB DDR4 2666MHz
- 650W 80 Plus Gold Certified PSU
- 512GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD
- 2TB HDD
Lots of ports and connections that should suit my gaming needs. The 512GB M.2 is probably a little small, and the 2TB secondary drive won’t get me far. There is another slot on the side for another drive, I’m not sure what I’ll want to put in there. Maybe a big SSD, not sure. Has anyone had any experience running an external drive bay of some sort with these faster data rate connections? I do it for my laptop with a tiny external SSD and it seems to work fine.
I see some 2TB M.2 drives going for around $200, so maybe I should just upgrade that right off the bat. I don’t know anything about those types of drives and what will fit in what I bought, so I’ll have to do some research there.
I could probably live with a 2TB M.2 and two more 2TB SSDs and ditch the 2TB HDD that comes with it.
Anyway - looking forward to it getting here. I’m curious how the i9 will do with some CPU intensive games. Also looking forward to perhaps some increased performance in VR.
Review of the i7 / 2080 model here…
