Virtual reality is great and all, but it needs a little more space — especially if you’re using a room-scale HTC Vive. And that probably means you’re going to want to set up your powerful VR gaming PC in an open area like your living room. And that means you’re going to want a PC that can hide out of the way in your TV cabinet. Enter the MSI Trident, the world’s smallest VR-ready PC.
While it doesn’t have the outright dual GTX 1080-powered gaming grunt of this custom-made miniature rig, the MSI Trident is small — measuring 346x232x71mm, it’s tiny enough that you could hide it underneath a PS4 Pro or Xbox One S.
It’s a hell of a lot more powerful than either of those consoles, though: with the option of up to a Core i7-6700 quad-core CPU (with an i5-6400 dual-core as an entry-level variant) running on a custom-built motherboard with Intel’s H110 chipset and integrated dual-band 802.11ac wi-fi, the VR-friendly part comes from a half-length Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 — meaning you should be able to run any recent SteamVR or Oculus Store title with decent graphics quality.
Rounding out the “this is a pretty damn versatile PC for its size” package is the option for a 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD in an internal bay, a M.2 PCI-Express SSD slot, and a couple of SO-DIMM slots for up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM. It’s also good to see a USB Type-C port on the Trident’s front panel, as well as a front HDMI output to hook up a virtual reality headset without having to reach behind the machine.
Everything is sufficiently cooled, says MSI, despite the case itself only measuring 4.7 litres in volume — a significant drop from the 6.5-litre Vortex G65. There’s no pricing or visibility on Aussie release dates for the MSI Trident just yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we find out. [MSI]
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