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Better known for laptops, MSI is no slouch for ready-made gaming desktops. The $4,299 Vision Elite RS packs flagship-class hardware in the spacious, well-lit interior of an MSI MEG Maestro 700L PZ chassis, including an Intel Core i9-14900KF processor and Nvidia’s fastest consumer graphics card, the GeForce RTX 4090 (as well as other cool things we’ll describe later). All this fancy hardware yields outstanding gaming performance, playing the latest titles at 4K resolution without a hitch and overkill horsepower for productivity and creative workflows. The Vision Elite is expensive, and its cooling fans make a racket, but it’s a tempting tower.Design: 270-Degree Vista VisionThe MSI Maestro case that houses the Vision Elite RS is an aluminum unibody mid-tower with a one-piece 270-degree glass panel around the front and sides, providing a panoramic view of the hardware within. Removing the large glass panel is as easy as removing two rear screws and sliding it off from one side. You’ll find plenty of room for hardware and cooling, promoting adequate airflow inside.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The case measures about 18.5 by 11.8 by 18.7 inches; it’s wider than most tower chassis but can still be stashed under your desk or shown off on top. The one-piece tempered glass panel has a slight tint that hides some of the unsightly bits but lets in plenty of light to flaunt the fancy hardware. Our test unit came with four 120mm RGB fans, all exhausting air outside the case, with three more 120mm fans on top for the AIO cooler.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
What we’d typically call the front-panel I/O is located on top of the chassis. You’ll find the typical fare of power and reset buttons and USB ports, including two USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) Type-A ports, a single speedy USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (20Gbps) Type-C port, and a 3.5mm audio jack. I’d have liked to see USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) ports here, but they’re on the rear panel if needed.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Getting inside the chassis is surprisingly easy. Remove two screws in the back, and the large tempered glass window slides out toward the side (the left side if you’re looking head-on). That gives you full access to the internals without a chassis support strut getting in the way. Just be careful with the window, as it is a large pane of glass. You’ll find plenty of holes for cable routing, and the chassis even supports back-connect motherboards like MSI’s Z790 Project Zero. (See our hands-on build with Project Zero from earlier this year.) Removable dust filters cover all but the rear fan location, which should help keep your internals cleaner longer. MSI did an excellent cable-management job, giving the Vision Elite RS a clean interior even without a Project Zero board.Gaming machines typically don’t have much software. Still, MSI preinstalls its helpful MSI Center utility and lets you download several other utilities, such as Mystic Light (RGB control) and Frozr AI cooling (temperature-based fan control). MSI Center even has a comprehensive hardware monitoring section for those who like to keep an eye on things. If you’re into tweaking and overclocking the system, the User Scenario applet will help. Otherwise, the Windows installation is clean and free of bloatware.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Around the back, we see the rear I/O bits and plenty of expansion slots (seven) if you’re considering adding something that requires a PCIe slot to this prefab. The rear connections have everything you need but are somewhat sparse for a high-end system due to the motherboard chosen (more on that in a moment): Seven USB ports (six Type-A and one Type-C), nonfunctional HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, a 2.5GbE network port and Wi-Fi 7 antenna connections, a six-plug (3.5mm) audio stack, and a legacy PS/2 port for a keyboard or mouse. The Inside: Roomy, Clean, and Full of RGBAs I said, getting into the Vision Elite is easy, and with no support pillar at the front left, rooting around inside the spacious chassis isn’t a problem. Cable management is impeccable, with plenty of room for cables behind the motherboard where the power supply is located. RGB lighting is ubiquitous, thanks to the half-dozen LED fans. If you want to upgrade, the Maestro chassis has ample space for a larger graphics card or custom water cooling with multiple radiators.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Unlike boutique PC builders, MSI sells a ready-made Vision Elite RS configuration. Besides Intel’s and Nvidia’s fastest products in the form of the Core i9-14900KF and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 (in this case MSI’s Gaming Trio 24G card), you get 64GB of DDR5-5600 memory, 2TB of NVMe solid-state storage, a 2.5Gbps Ethernet card, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, and an MSI triple-120mm RGB AIO CPU cooler. Outside of custom cooling, you can’t put much better hardware in this case—or can you?
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Surprisingly, the installed Pro Z790-VC Wi-Fi motherboard is quite basic. While it does the job and gives you the latest and greatest capabilities, such as Wi-Fi 7, I’d have liked to see something a bit higher up the product stack for such a deluxe build—perhaps MSI’s MAG Z790 Tomahawk Max Wi-Fi, with a modern midrange audio solution and more robust power delivery. Still, the Pro Z790-VC is decent enough and gets the most out of the installed hardware.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Overall, the Maestro case’s wide window and brushed-aluminum finish look high-end, and you can’t get much better components inside (or much more room to add others, with plenty of slots, SATA ports, and a free M.2 socket). My only concern is its size: Although the chassis is classified as a mid-tower, it’s wider than most. Ensure you have enough room for wherever you plan to show it off.Testing the MSI Vision Elite RS: Fast as Fast Can BeWe pitted the Vision Elite against other top-end gaming machines for our benchmark charts. Contenders included the recently tested Origin Genesis 2024 ($4,100 base, about $6,700 as tested); the Corsair One i500 ($3,599 base, $4,699 as tested); the Velocity Micro Raptor Z95 ($2,369 base, $4,499 as tested); and finally the Acer Predator Orion 7000 ($4,299 as tested). All these gaming rigs sport top-of-the-line Intel Core i9 CPUs, and all but the Raptor have RTX 4090 cards. (That machine settles for an RTX 4080.) You can see the systems’ specs below.
Productivity and Content Creation TestsWe run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene. At the same time, Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We then use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems. It uses Adobe’s famous image editor, Creative Cloud version 22, to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks, from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
MSI’s Vision Elite RS did precisely what we expected for its hardware, keeping up with or surpassing the similarly equipped systems. The Intel Core i9-14900KS is today’s fastest desktop processor, and the triple-120mm AIO cooler manages it effectively. However, when the CPU and GPU get stressed, as in heavy gaming, the fans ramp up and get obnoxiously loud. Fortunately, adjusting the fan curve in MSI Center’s User Scenario tab mitigates this minor complaint.Graphics and Gaming TestsFor gaming desktops, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, the more modest Night Raid (suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and the more demanding Time Spy (suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We also run two OpenGL exercises, rendered offscreen by the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5 to allow for different native display resolutions. More frames per second (fps) means higher performance.Our real-world gaming benchmarks are built into F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These three represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively, and we test them at higher resolutions and quality settings than on gaming laptops. We run Valhalla and Siege twice each at Ultra quality (at both 1080p and 4K), while F1 2021 is run at 4K with and without AMD and Nvidia’s performance-boosting FSR and DLSS features turned on.
Across these benchmarks, the MSI desktop performed as you’d expect an RTX 4090- and i9-14900KF-equipped system to, flirting with the top of the charts. 4K gaming is a breeze with hardware like this, and if you’re an esports addict who prefers lower resolutions like 1440p, the Vision Elite will cruise at more than 160fps easily. With its top-of-the-line hardware, we expected nothing less.For the curious, MSI’s Vision Elite RS web page lists performance estimates (courtesy of UL’s 3DMark) for popular games like Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and more at 1080p and 1440p resolutions.Verdict: Premium, Powerful, and PanoramicThe Vision Elite RS is MSI’s flagship prebuilt gaming rig, and it shows. From the panoramic views inside the Maestro chassis to the high-end hardware inside, you’ll find few things not to like about this machine. You won’t find any configuration options on MSI’s website besides different gaming headsets, though the company sells less costly prefabs like the Aegis and Trident series.Like every product, the Vision Elite RS isn’t perfect. The motherboard used hails from the budget side of the tracks but still has enough ports and power to support the flagship-class hardware. One minor flaw is the fan noise; while the system is generally quiet, the fans were louder than expected during stress testing and lengthy gaming sessions. Tweaking fan speeds solved that problem without noticeable performance loss but didn’t fix an occasional hum or resonance emanating from the chassis. I couldn’t find the source, though I’d be willing to bet this was a one-off situation with a system shipped across the country to this reviewer.Over the years, MSI has expanded its desktop product line, with the Vision Elite RS as the cherry on top. The Maestro 700 XL PZ is an awesome-looking chassis with plenty of high-end hardware inside, backed by a one-year warranty. If you have a healthy budget and don’t want the hassle of choosing your own components, the Vision Elite RS is a fine choice to get power the easy way.
The Bottom Line
MSI’s Vision Elite RS is a worthy option among prefab, high-end gaming desktops. Considering its premium trappings, its gorgeous glass case contains class-leading components for a decent price.
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