R&D where dream rigs come to life

MSI Special Single Manufacturer Build

Is using one manufacturer’s components a good idea?

GUY COCKER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY

THE CONCEPT

IF YOU BUILT your desktop PC, it’s probably a hodgepodge of different manufacturer components all working in tandem. That’s the beauty of PC building—if you want to mix things up for price or performance reasons, common standards mean you can. But every manufacturer seems to have its own lighting standards and management app, and some use different styling or coloring that can mess with a uniform look. But what if you want to build a computer, while still recreating the feel of a pre-built system. What would that look like?

Thanks to the good people at MSI, we can find out this issue. During discussions about the company’s 2022 components, including its first SSD drive, the Spatium M480, and the Sekira 100R case, we asked them: could we get everything into our labs at the same time and make a build out of it all?

The company obliged, sending all the components we needed apart from the CPU and RAM, the only items they don’t manufacture.

The resulting all-MSI build is at the cutting edge of current tech specs, thanks to its DDR5 and PCIe 4.0-compatible motherboard, and what’s more, it’s also pretty good value for money. Remember, adding the latest SSD and RAM to your build will increase its overall price, so if you already have some DDR4 RAM you want to use, go for the cheaper DDR4 model motherboard while you wait for DDR5 sticks to come down in price.

It’s also worth noting that MSI provided its own keyboard, mouse, and monitor to complete the look, but we sadly didn’t have space to include them. Rest assured, we’ll cover them in a future issue. For now though, let’s get on with the build!

THE INGREDIENTS

MSI SENT SOME fantastic components for us to work with—we’re not talking money-no-object stuff (see Sam’s water-cooled build on page 16 for that), but the type of components I’d choose if I was trying to spec out a value for money future-proofed system.

Key to this is the motherboard, the MSI MPG Z690 EDGE WIFI ($310), which supports Intel’s 12th generation processors, PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and DDR5 RAM. You can save $20-30 by opting for MSI’s DDR4 version of the same board, which I’d recommend if you have existing RAM you can reuse, because DDR5 RAM is still just so ridiculously expensive right now.

Thankfully, PCIe 4.0 SSD drives aren’t as much of a premium over their 3.0 equivalents, despite offering nearly double the speed. The MSI Spatium M480 PLAY 2TB ($330) is $100 more than a PCIe 3.0 equivalent like the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. MSI’s drive seems custom-built to appeal to the PS5 market thanks to its giant heatsink, but this cooling will at least keep the storage cool during serious PC use. MSI provided a relatively low-end graphics card for this build, so if you have the budget, we’d recommend the 3060 or 3070 instead.