MSI's new gaming PCs are outrageous
Eye-tracking laptops, cylindrical gaming rigs -- and an all-in-one with junk in the trunk.
MSI has seen the future of PC gaming, and it's awesome.*
Consider the GT72S Tobii, a beefy gaming laptop with Tobii's eye tracking hardware baked right in. We gave the GT72S Tobii's eye-tracking a shot back in June at Computex 2015, and it didn't disappoint. Three infrared sensors sit below the laptop's display, tracking your eye's movements and translating them into inputs. In an action game like Assassin's Creed Syndicate, that might mean aiming at a target just by looking at them. In a space shooter like Elite: Dangerous, you'd be able to look around your ship's cockpit with a glance -- leaving your mouse hand free to steer.
Eye-tracking isn't a new concept, and you can buy Tobii's trackers as standalone peripherals. But it could be a neat little diversion, if your favorite games are supported, and eye-tracking picks up steam with more developers. Unfortunately there's (still) no word on a price, but the GT2S Tobii will be available later this month.
Then there's the Vortex Gaming Tower. It's a 6.5-liter bucket that you can fill to the brim with high-end gaming hardware, including dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 GPUs in SLI and an unspecified Intel processor. There's no mention of overclocking and what cramming all of that hardware into such confines is going to sound like. But MSI does claim that the 360-degree cooling design will keep things manageable.
Better still, the Vortex is apparently easy to upgrade; we'll need to see the machine up close to see how roomy that internal layout could possibly be. The Vortex will be available sometime this year, but there's no word on a starting price.
And finally, not to be overshadowed by Origin's Omni all-in-one PC, there's the Gaming 27XT. It too supports a discrete desktop-class graphics card, grafted onto the rear of its screen. Origin's Omni ups the ante by cramming an Nvidia Titan X and an octa-core Intel Core i7-5960X into its all-in-one, but MSI's implementation looks like the PC is wearing a funky backpack, and I'm a sucker for flashiness.
There's no word on a price, detailed specifications or a release date, so we'll need to see this one in the flesh to get the rest of the details.
*Your definition of awesome may vary.