Physical Teardown

A barebones unit, you'll start by pulling the MSI Nightblade apart, which takes a while because it means removing screws and sliding bits and bobs out of the way. Taking the main cover off is easily done since you only have to remove two screws, making common upgrades quick and easy. Taking the metal lid off can be a bit more difficult, so be careful and take your time!


Once off, you'll have full access to the area your chosen VGA will slot into on one side, while drives are stored in the top, in clever trays for the single 2.5-inch bay and two 3.5-inch bays.


You'll want to remove the two screws shown above next. These fasten a bracket that helps with keeping the GPU in place to the chassis.


With the two screws removed, you can pop the panel out, which leaves you with a hole into the Nightblade's innards. There are two more screws between the rear I/O panel and the expansion slots that need to be removed.


Two more screws have to come out; one on the edge of the rear and another MSI sunk into the case, although it is still close to the metal surface that makes up the top.


With the 2.5-inch tray removed, you can see the provided PCIe bridge. With all the screws shown before removed, you can lift the bridge itself and the GPU tray out by using a single finger to lift the right side of said bridge PCB. There's a nice round tab here for you to do so, and your 2.5-inch device and the tray that holds it do not need to be removed for you to do so; I simply removed the tray to show the entire PCB. Once it's out of the way, you can see directly into the Nightblade MI2's socket area.


There will be one more thing you'll need to do at this point, and that's to unplug the cooling fan's power plug to the left of the CPU socket; it is right between the Wi-Fi card and SO-DIMM slot.


The next step is to remove the CPU cooler, which is done by removing two screws along the rear that were exposed by removing the GPU tray (along with the fan and bridge PCB that are attached to it). The screws are on either side of the heatsink's fin array.


You can loosen the four CPU socket screws and remove the heatsink now. You should find a cover MSI placed over the socket, there to help with holding the heatsink in place tightly as the unit is shipped to you while also protecting the socket's 1151 pins underneath.