Review: MSI MegaPC

Specification II

What you get for your money The MegaPC is constructed from a steel chassis with Aluminium casing. The front is made from silver plastic with orange painted decoration. From the front it looks more like a piece of HiFi equipment than a computer. This is mainly due to the lack of CD / Floppy drives on display and the fact that it has an LCD and volume control knob. Size wise it is a little lower, basically the same width and a little deeper than the shuttle SS51G. Opinion varied widely in the labs regarding the looks of the unit. The orange trimmings are not to everyone's taste and there is too much use of plastic on the front. The rest of the casing is very well built and constructed of quality aluminium. The clean lines and uncluttered appearance are achieved by MSI's cleaver stealthing of the CD drive and front connections. Access to the headphones, front USB, SP-DIF In and front FireWire ports is gained by opening a flap at the bottom of the unit. This works well as these connections are only used occasionally. The flap did not impede the connections in any way. The CD drive fits behind the top flap and once connected to the motherboard and power supply we were highly impressed by the way the flap opens automatically as the CD tray extends. It is worth taking note that a slot load CD/DVD is not suitable for the MegaPC. Even more impressive is the way that MSI have provided a CD eject button as part of the case. We spent ages trying to find the mechanics that pushed the CD's eject button, until we realised that MSI had been clever and created an electronic solution that sends the eject signal to the CD drive through the IDE connection. At the rear the MegaPC provides all the usual array of connections, including a parallel printer port and PS2 mouse and keyboard ports. There is also a modem, RJ45 LAN and SP-DIF optical out port.