Internals II
The previous page highlighted that the only position a hard drive could be installed was on the right extremity.
MSI use a decent drive cage that locks itself into position via the lever at the front. The drive is then located near the two standard Molex power connectors from the PSU. This method of mounting makes quick hard drive removal that little bit easier.
Looking back the board now, and specifically at the socket area.
Looking from left to right, the passive heatsink doesn't quite cover the entire Northbridge package. There's good reason for that. The socket area requires a custom, low-profile heatsink that'll function in a slimline case. Just out of shot are the two DDR slots present on this motherboard, giving a total of 2GB of possible RAM.
The cooler is a strange beast. It attaches the same way most Shuttle's coolers do, that is, it screws through the motherboard into receptive, threaded holes. The copper bottom and TIM are nice touches. The motherboard supports all 400 / 533FSB processors. It'll need to do a sterling job to keep a 3.06GHz CPU happy.
The fan pulls in air through the side and then blows over the heatsink. The lack of mounting height prohibits the use of a fan in the more conventional on-top position.
Now you can see why part of the passive heatsink has been taken away. The fan sits perilously close by. The fan's power cable is shown as being plugged in. However, this board arrived with a dead fan header. We had to manually use a Molex extender to ensure that it functioned. There are no spare fan headers, unsurprisingly.
A look at the basic connections in place. The floppy and optical drive holder slots in above the cooler.
A side-on shot of the cooler. The front ports are just a little out of focus. In short, if you're really thinking of stacking the Hermes barebones to the limit, you can run a 3.06GHz CPU with 2GB of system RAM. Spacing for only a single hard and optical drive are the obvious drawbacks to a slimline case, although a combination optical drive and 200GB+ HD would give you decent flexibility and storage potential. Those who are looking to play, for example, UT2003 had better look elsewhere. The puny on-board graphics' 3D ability and lack of a dedicated AGP slot preclude all the but the basic of gaming. To be totally fair, that's not what this system is about.
