MSI announces Ampere refresh to MEG Aegis Ti5 gaming desktop

For PC gamers keen to embrace all things Nvidia Ampere without the DIY hassle, MSI has announced an Ampere flavoured update to its gaming desktop: the MEG Aegis Ti5. 

The gaming desktop is purported to be the world's first Nvidia Ampere series gaming desktop (with more to come, we're sure) offering an Intel Core i9-10900K processor, along with an Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card. It also offers options up to 128GB of DDR4, and up to three M.2 SSDs, depending on the configuration you choose. 

Predictably, for a gaming system, the MEG Aegis Ti5 also has a few neat tricks up its sleeve. It utilises MSI's Silent Strom Cooling 4 which separates the air chamber cooling in a bid to keep high performance at all times alongside lower temperatures. It also changes the layout of the motherboard to an upside-down design which MSI reckons is ideal for the RTX 3080 and its cooling. 

It also has the "world's first gaming knob design". Curious? It has an LED knob on the front of the machine which allows players to switch between different system performance settings as well as display the system status. 

The knob also doubles up as the start button for a game and you can assign an exclusive profile for that game, such as tweaking performance, sound and even lighting effects on the PC. The knob also has the technology to detect your current location and then display local weather and temperature information on its LED panel. Gimmicky? Yup, but at least it's something different, we guess. 

A little more practically minded, MSI has also included WiFi 6, 2.5G LAN and Thunderbolt 3 technology which MSI reckons will help "players easily back up game records" which sounds like a colossal way of underselling Thunderbolt 3 to us. 

Finally, there's Sound Tune noise cancelling technology. A new idea by MSI, it uses AI learning technology to help players filter the background noise of the environment, reducing the noise of other players' backgrounds, thereby making communication clearer. How well it actually works, we'll need to wait and see. 

Ultimately, the big piece of news here is that MSI is first out of the gate with an Ampere based gaming system. Previously, the MEG Aegis Ti5 was meant to launch with a 20-series flavoured card so we're guessing MSI has been holding out for the latest GPUs. 

There's no word yet on pricing or availability though. Expect this one to be suitably pricey.