Unboxing the MSI Aegis Ti5, the first, second, and third impressions it spread around PC Labs? The 1987 film RoboCop. With looks straight out of a cheesy cyborg thriller, this tower is unlike any other. MSI’s Aegis gaming desktop line is known for outlandish designs, so the Ti5 is “normal” in that respect. And its guts are indeed Terminator-grade: Its formidable components include an Intel Core i9-10900K CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card for pushing triple-digit frame rates at 4K resolution. It even delivers on some practicality, with a good port selection.
Of course, RoboCop’s most memorable line is from the manic TV host Bixby Snyder: “I’d buy that for a dollar!” You’ll need 3,399 of them to pick up our test model, but aside from its giant, from-the-future chassis and a unique front-panel dial control, this Aegis alas offers few extras to justify all those bucks. Look to the Alienware Aurora R11 for a less extreme dose of sci-fi, or our Editors’ Choice-winning Corsair Vengeance i7200 for a lifeline to reality. Citizen.
‘Dead or Alive, You’re Coming With Me’
RoboCop. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I, Robot. The list goes on, but MSI’s design team surely binge-watched dystopian AI-themed flicks before drawing up plans for the MEG Aegis Ti5. Its robot-head-like design is even more radical than that of 2017’s Aegis Ti3.
Objectively, the chassis stands out. Subjectively, well, beauty is in the all-seeing robot eye of the beholder. There’s little doubt that it will draw attention. It even has a carrying handle for moving its 33-pound bulk, or should we say, hulk. (Perhaps to a nearby closet in case someone comes to visit?)
The Ti5 is bulky for a midtower, at 20 by 9.4 by 21.7 inches (HWD). The cylinder supporting the tower on its metal stand holds a 750-watt SFX-style power supply. The cylinder, alas, doesn’t rotate or move; it’s just for show.
Each side of the cylinder has an RGB ring light going most of the way around. Additional RGB lighting zones line the front and side panels. You would be hard-pressed to find a tower with more, and more prominent, RGB lighting.
All the lighting on this tower is configurable within the MSI Dragon Center app.
Please Hold While We Dial the Future
The MEG Aegis Ti5’s most intriguing feature is the front-mounted Gaming Dial, an LCD-screened knob that controls all sorts of functionality.
Pressing the dial changes its mode; turning it cycles through each mode’s settings. It can be used for volume control, lighting, cycling power profiles, displaying stats such as CPU frequency and temperature, and counting down to Skynet becoming self-aware. (Well, all except the last one.)
Best of all, its modes and settings are user-configurable in the supplied Dragon Center app. This includes making your own shortcuts. The Dial can even display an image of your choosing, animations included. Though it’s unlikely to change how you use your computer, the Gaming Dial adds uniqueness, a vital attribute at the MEG Aegis Ti5’s price. Flip-out headphone hangers are another nifty non-essential.
Topside, the MEG Aegis Ti5 shows off its GeForce RTX 3080—to be specific, MSI’s Ventus 3X OC card (see our review of the similar MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio)—beneath a see-through window in supercar fashion, bathed in RGB lighting.
The port selection just forward of the window includes a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A (5Gbps) ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C (10Gbps) port, and headphone and microphone jacks.
Meanwhile, the MSI Z490 MicroATX motherboard offers four more USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (three Type-A and one Type-C), a Thunderbolt 3 port (a rarity, even on a high-end desktop), a pair of legacy USB 2.0 ports, and a PS/2 port. The audio selection includes surround jacks, line-in, line-out, microphone-in, and S/PDIF digital audio out. The HDMI port is disabled in favor of the GeForce RTX 3080’s single HDMI and three DisplayPort video outputs.
You get both 1Gbps and 2.5Gbps Ethernet jacks for wired networking. A built-in Intel AX201 card provides Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 wireless. I like that its antennas are built into the case instead of protruding externally. Overall, the MEG Aegis Ti5 offers solid connectivity.
Not Liquid Metal? (We’d Settle for Less Plastic)
Unfortunately, build quality is one of the tower’s weaknesses. Its plastic exterior panels, especially the gray ones, feel inexpensive. The glossy black plastic portions fare better, but they are a fingerprint and dust magnet. A tower this pricey should use more premium materials, such as aluminum or tempered glass. (Given the price, I half-expected the T-1000’s mimetic polyalloy.)
The side panels slide rearward after removing two screws apiece. (You’ll need a Philips screwdriver—no thumbscrews here.) Take care not to pull the panels too far away since they’re tethered by wires that connect their RGB lighting.
The 240mm CPU liquid-cooling radiator dominates the left side. Getting to the motherboard’s four DDR4 memory slots or two M.2 SSDs requires the radiator’s removal—and potentially more than that. I didn’t try to get further inside, and MSI doesn’t provide a service manual. It looks, though, to be a not-so-simple process that complicates upgrades.
Upgrade prospects are marginally better for the two 2.5-inch bays behind the right panel. Though they are relatively easy to access, they have neither toolless caddies nor SATA and power cables routed to the vicinity. Running the cables will require motherboard access, which means removing the radiator, anyway.
One comparatively easy-to-upgrade component is the single 3.5-inch hard drive. It sits in its own bay under the single-screw bottom panel.
On that note, with up to five drives, the MEG Aegis Ti5 provides acceptable storage expansion for a mid-tower. It could be easier to upgrade, but doing so isn’t impossible. Nothing is proprietary except the case, though SFX power supplies do cost a premium.
Benchmarking the MEG Aegis Ti5: ‘You’re a Terminator, Right?’
The Cyberdyne Systems Model 101—I mean MEG Aegis Ti5—that I’m reviewing is closely related to the $3,399 Aegis Ti5 model 10TE-036US, the top-shelf United States configuration. It features a 10-core Core i9-10900K processor, a 10GB GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, and 32GB of DDR4-2933 dual-channel memory. The warranty is just one year. No peripherals were included with my review unit, but model 10TE-036US comes with a keyboard and mouse.
For storage, my unit is upgraded with a 2TB NVMe solid-state drive for its Windows 10 Pro operating system (actually two 1TB SSDs striped together in RAID 0) and a 3TB hard drive for storage. By contrast, model 10TE-036US has a 1TB SSD with Windows 10 Home and a 2TB hard drive.
The hardware alone can be had for several hundred less. MSI’s compact MEG Trident X (model 10TE-1467US) was $2,799 with almost identical components as I typed this. Among larger towers, the Asus ROG Strix G35CZ (G35CZ-XH988) was $2,799, the HP Omen 30L went for about $2,949 on Amazon, and the Alienware Aurora R11 listed at $3,254 on Dell.com.
The MEG Aegis Ti5’s design and features, such as the Gaming Dial, are what you get for the extra dough. However, even if its design were objectively stellar, it’s still a hefty premium. Sorely missing is built-in CPU overclocking for its Core i9-10900K, something that would set it apart from nearly all its competition. (Granted, you can still manually overclock the system through the Dragon Center app.) The liquid-cooling system practically begs for it.
Let’s move onto the benchmark testing. I compared the MEG Aegis Ti5 against four powerful gaming desktops, led by the Falcon Northwest Talon with its 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor ($4,956 as tested). Note that the Alienware model used a GeForce RTX 3090 card, as opposed to the RTX 3080s in the rest.
The MEG Aegis Ti5’s cooling fans behaved themselves throughout benchmarking. Though the tower isn’t silent, its sound level is low enough to blend with background noise in most environments.
Storage, Media, and CPU Tests
Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, a holistic performance suite that simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. A score of 4,000 points indicates overkill for Microsoft Office or Google Docs; the MEG Aegis Ti5 scored a colossal 7,566 points, while the Falcon Northwest tower scored a ridiculous 8,454. They were the only two systems that completed the test—PCs with ultra-high-end or seldom-seen hardware sometimes balk at it—so I’ve left out that comparison chart. (See more about how we test desktops.)
Next up is a pair of CPU-crunching tests: Cinebench R15 stresses all available processor cores and threads while rendering a complex image, while in our Handbrake test, we transcode a 12-minute 4K video down to 1080p.
The MEG Aegis Ti5 unsurprisingly matched the other Core i9 machines. The Falcon Northwest dominated with its 16-core Ryzen. Six more cores and 12 more available processing threads are no small advantage.
The final test in this section is photo editing. We use an early 2018 release of Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud to apply 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG image, timing each operation and adding up the totals. This test is not as CPU-focused as Cinebench or Handbrake, bringing the performance of the storage subsystem, memory, and GPU into play.
The MSI continued to do just as well as the other Core i9 units.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
Our first two benchmarks in this section measure the gaming performance potential of a PC. In UL’s 3DMark, we run two DirectX 11 tests, Sky Diver (lightweight, capable of running on integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, for high-end gaming rigs). Unigine Corp.’s Superposition is another gaming simulation; it uses a different rendering engine to produce a complex 3D scene.
Both tests were status quo showings for the Aegis Ti5, but that’s not a knock. Numbers this high have only become possible since the GeForce RTX 3080 debuted.
Now for real-world gaming. We use the built-in benchmarks of Far Cry 5 (at its Normal and Ultra image-quality presets) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (at its Medium and Very High presets) at three different screen resolutions. Far Cry 5 uses DirectX 11, while we flip Rise of the Tomb Raider to DirectX 12.
The MEG Aegis Ti5 produced great numbers for 4K gaming. The Alienware did slightly better with its GeForce RTX 3090, but not by nearly enough to justify that card’s stratospheric price.
‘It Can’t Be Bargained With’
Thanks to its potent Core i9 and GeForce RTX 3080 combo, the MEG Aegis Ti5 accomplishes its fundamental goal of being an excellent 4K gaming platform. It also earns points for its Thunderbolt 3 port and unique, if not game-changing, Gaming Dial. (And don’t forget its flip-out headphone hangers.)
Though the Ti5 is more expensive than similarly equipped competitors, its unrestrained sci-fi look will surely play a bigger part in your buying decision than its finances. Unless its style tickles your futuristic fancy—or John Connor asks you to send a machine back in time—the Alienware Aurora R11 and Corsair Vengeance i7200 are more sensible picks for high-end gaming because of their better pricing, easier upgrades, and more level-headed appeal.
