Review System

Assembly

Installing the ATX motherboard inside the MSI MEG Prospect 700R is done by traditional means using spacers and screws. The grommets around the case line up in an excellent fashion, so that you should be able to keep things really clean and tidy. As the enclosure quite large and bulky, GPUs will have no issue fitting as well, making the 300+ mm long variant we use look rather miniscule.


Including 2.5" drives in your build will be easy, regardless of the state of your system. You may simply remove the mounting plate and then screw the drive onto it before putting it on the backside of the motherboard tray.


The 3.5" trays that MSI includes in the MEG Prospect 700R are made of plastic and come with mounting holes for smaller 2.5" drives as well. However, adding a larger 3.5" "spinning rust" is tool-less and once the storage unit is in place you may simply slide the filled tray back into the cage until it snaps down securely.


The PSU requires that you mount the frame onto it first before sliding it into place. As you can see, the wiring has just enough room to be pulled out of the bay between the HDD cage and side wall.


Including a 360 AIO at the top of the case is very easy as there is tons of space. Even with the unit installed, you have a large gap to the top edge of the motherboard, which makes cable routing easy as well. In fact, you should be able to install a push/pull configuration in the ceiling of the MEG Prospect 700R.


With everything installed, the interior of the case is nice and clean, with all the wiring coming through at a good location. In the rear, almost all of the wiring was bunched up down the center, as the other channel isn't very big and as such limits the user from including the bulk of leads from the AIO. We also went as far as to connect the four separate ARGB elements of the AIO to the PCB by using a 4-1 splitter cable which we supplied ourselves for this build. While it is nice that MSI is including such a wire for PWM fans, that doesn't feel as useful.

Finished Looks

With everything turned on, the fans light up alongside the display showing a loading animation. As the screen is self-sufficient at its core, you don't need the software or even Windows present for it to function.


You can clearly see the fans shine through the front of the chassis and thanks to the clean window panel, all your hardware can be shown off easily as well. Looking at the rear, everything is where you would expect to see it with the glow of the rear exhaust unit clearly visible as well. The display allows you to cycle through various color animations, but also a total of 12 solid choices, which is more than most built-in controllers will offer you. You may feast your eyes on those hues below.

Display

The built-in 4.3" screen deserves its own closer look. After you boot the system up, the screen will by default go into screen saver mode, showing a MEG branding as a logo. Once you tap on the screen, it gives you seven main options to run through.


The first two, ARGB and Fans, communicate directly with the PCB on the backside of the motherboard. In terms of the colors, you have several animations to pick from or those twelve aforementioned colors. In terms of the fan speed, oddly enough, MSI has opted to group the first three PWM connectors as "Port A" while the remaining three of the six are individually selectable. This means that the headers 1 to 3 are really meant to be used for the front intake fans, while the rear fan gets its own control by using any one of the other headers. You may adjust the speed by adjusting the percentage left or right of the selected port.


The unit itself comes with a few embedded screen savers, which you may pick from. Here you may also set how quickly it goes into that mode and toggle if the display should turn off after 60 seconds of inactivity. The screen saver looks quite nice and takes up the full screen. Then there is the Sync Mode select, which allows you to pick if you want to control the fan/ARGB via the display, MSI's software, or via the motherboard directly using ARGB and Fan headers.


While ARGB and fan control has that flexibility, there are two menu options that are only accessible if you use the MSI Center application, as both use that software interface to fetch data from the internet to display. This are the weather and clock. Lastly, there is the temperature display, which refers to that one diode that is present within the chassis. Interestingly enough, there is no way to show CPU or GPU temperatures - both of which could be accessible through software and passed onto the display theoretically speaking. Alternatively, MSI could have included two or three diodes and hard coded the toggle of those results into the display itself without much additional effort.

If you would like to see the display in action, MSI has a good video rundown if its capabilities on YouTube: