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Cooling & PSU
MSI stuck with traditional air-cooling for the MEGA 651. You won't find anything fancy like heat-pipes here, but they did do a slight variation anyways.
As you can see, the heatsink used is a regular aluminum heatsink. Cooling it works a little differently where you setup the fan on the side to blow air through the heatsink. MSI pre-applies some thermal paste for you. I don't have any specs, but I can tell you it's paste, and not a TIM sticker. Performance seems to be on par with other thermal compounds we've used.
Installation is straightforward (no tools needed), albeit a little tricky. The MEGA 651 is very tight inside, and I found the toughest thing to install was the heatsink for the CPU. I still got it done in under a minute, but word of advice, install the heatsink's fan after installing the heatsink, or you won't be able to see the heatsink's clips catch the socket's notches.
So the heatsink looks interesting, but how does it performs? Well, since we don't have any other cooler that will fit, we'll be comparing numbers with the Intel stock aluminum cooler on the ABIT IC7. Temperatures are done with the cases closed (IC7 was in a Lian-Li PC65U). What we are going to learn from this test is the performance of the MSI cooler in its environment, compared to a standard tower with stock cooling.
Temperatures aren't anything spectacular. In fact, they are terrible in my opinion, but it is within spec of the Pentium 4, and I didn't experience any instability or clock throttling. The above temperatures were without any addon cards though..., when I dropped in our All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro, temperatures spiked up to 63°C while running our UT2003 benchmarks. Ouch.
There are a few reasons why cooling performance isn't that good. One problem is the MEGA 651 is pretty tight inside. This poses a problem because there is nowhere to accommodate a case fan.
Another issue is installing addon cards will block the CPU heatsink's ability to draw cooler outside air. As there is no case fan, the heatsink needs to draw air through a perforated opening on the side of the case. Above is the heatsink installed. Air is drawn into the fan, and blown out the other side. The problem comes up when you want to install an addon card...
As you can see, with a PCI and/or AGP card installed, you end up blocking the fan. Now, air still does circulate, but the airflow is noticably reduced when an addon card is installed. Eitherway, just to confirm, I removed the AIW 9700 Pro, and retested the MEGA 651 temperatures without a card. As I expected, temperatures dropped by about 3°C.
The only fan you'll find, other than the CPU HSF, is the power supply fan. The PSU is a mere 200W, but considering you'll likely only have a CPU, memory, hard drive and a couple cards at most, it should be sufficient. With our complement of a 2.4 P4, 512MB of Corsair TWINX, an 80GB 7200 RPM HDD, 16x DVD, and an AiW 9700 Pro, the system performed admirably, without any crashes or PSU issues.
Noise
Given the amount of fans, you will probably guess the MEGA 651 is quiet, and in guessing so, you are correct. The fans are speed controlled, and only spin at full throttle when the CPU is under 100% load. Even at full speed, noise levels are tolerable. If you're gaming, this probably won't bother you, and mundane tasks like web surfing, or email will be near silent. In fact, on some of the cooler days here, the fan actually stopped spinning when the PC was idle.
Installation and Potential Issue
As you may guess, there isn't much room to work with inside. It would be a good idea to disassemble the drive cages before proceeding.
The hard drive installs into one of the cages beneath the optical drive. It installs in an upside down manner, but it shouldn't cause any problems.
The optical drive is a snap to install. For all the devices, MSI has included more than enough screws for everything.
Though I had no problems installing an ATI AiW 9700 Pro and AiW VE, I did have major issues with the MSI FX5900-VTD128. The card just didn't want to fit. The problem I ran into was one of the screws on the IO panel of the video card was keeping the FX5900 from properly seating. Another issue was the second HSF on the video card's back was pushing up against the PSU wiring, putting pressure on the card. I eventually got it to fit, but I'm a little wary in saying all video cards will work fine. It's best to ask around beforehand if your card will fit in the MEGA 651.
Next Page - The Motherboard, BIOS and Test Setup
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MSI MEGA 651 PC: The MSI MEGA 651 PC is a full-function multimedia PC that combines information and entertainment to offer hi-fi stereo, DVD/VCD, MP3, TV and high-performing computer functions.
