MSI Vortex, good system recommendation

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I've had my MSI system about one month now.  It has performed excellently, my specs are in my signature.  Compact and quiet, I've burned it in for over one hundred hours and have never had a lockup.  Priced at about one thousand it was a balanced system between the lower end systems and the upper echelon gaming systems.  Specifically engineered for simulations, it has offered smooth performance in both P3dV4 and Xplane11 (check out my videos in the videos forum).  It boots from a cold start in about ten to fifteen seconds, ready for sign in.  I run legacy VBA apps I have written.  The UIEngine Valley benchmark yields 70 fps at max resolution and settings.

I have long followed the reputation of MSI motherboards and hardware by reading reviews both here and on the hardware websites.  Like the good reputation of ASUS, they put together a well thought out and harmonized system.  I run HWMonitor and my cpu temps stay below 50C with stock cooling and a 350W PSU.  For those looking to upgrade without exceeding 1000, I can't recommend the Vortex highly enough.  Set up was easy.  Only problem I had was locating the power switch, it is a very tiny button on the upper right hand side.  I thought I had a dead system at first and I had to scan the instructions to figure out where it was.

I keep my system well ventilated.  I hate many modern computer desks because they stick the cpu in an unventilated cubby.  They were designed by aesthetic artists, not by computer engineers.  I always caution people furnishing their offices against them, temps can easily exceed 150 degrees.  When I supported my WAN in Arizona and New Mexico 17 years ago, I had my employees' cpus placed in wide open spaces on the floors.  My server rooms were well set up, with my server modules, routers and switches mounted on racks.

I still laugh when I think about mounting the switches, I was so afraid of dropping them.  I held them in my right hand while I mounted them, finally my telecom guy, also a pilot, came in on the weekend to help me finish mounting them in my other server closet.  I had fiber connection between the two closets, then I had our home office Cisco man dial in to configure them a day later.  Speed improvements were astounding on my WAN and reliability went way up.  Sadly, I never had the bandwidth to get Cisco certified myself, and I was promoted from my role to development a year later.  My former boss, still close friends, moved to Arizona to take my place.  He told me he hired me as WAN admin because I was not afraid to give the wrong answer to their questions and be corrected on my answer.  They turned down several applicants who tried to talk their way out of their questions.  I would just politely say "I don't know",.or "Would you please tell me".

Thanks for letting me share,

John