Physical Components

With both panels removed, you get easy and clear access to all the bits inside the MSI Trident 3 desktop, but from up top, you'll find the drives sorely missing. Flip the unit over, however, and you'll find the drives located there.


Up on the board itself, I found the chipset cooler; a tiny slice of metal. The CPU cooler is a blower-type, that sucks air from inside the unit and exhausts it out the back.


There are two SO-DIMM slots here; two 8 GB DIMMs are pre-installed in my unit. The custom MSI GAMING GTX 1060 6 GB VGA is on one side; with a whole area all its own.


Power is provided to the custom MSI GAMING GTX 1060 6 GB GPU via a single 6-pin connection that plugs into the mainboard. Wi-Fi connectivity is provided by an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3168 card.


Looking again at the bottom and the drives installed there, we can see the 2.5" drive in a nice tray with anti-vibration pads, while the SATA M.2 SSD just plugs right in. My unit has a Kingston SSD, 256 GB in size.


The mechanical drive is a Hitachi unit, 1 TB in size with a 7200 RPM platter.