A look Inside

Opening the system is quick and easy. Simply remove the side panel screws and slide the panels off. The top panel is also removed by sliding it back and lifting it off.


There are two HDD trays above the motherboard; one holds a Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB 5400 RPM storage drive. The motherboard has an extra SATA port that can be used with the additional 2.5" HDD tray to expand system storage.


To access the motherboard, you will need to remove the cooler, which is quite easy. Start by taking the fan out by removing the four screws holding it to the heatsink. With that done, loosen the four screws holding the heatsink to the backplate.


With the heatsink removed, users will have access to the system's memory, and getting to the remaining SATA port is easier now as well. The heatsink itself is rather beefy for an SFF system and packs five heat pipes. As for the memory, MSI uses two 16 GB sticks from Samsung with CL 20-18-19-43 timings at 2666 MHz.


The OS drive is from Samsung as well, and it is an M.2 NVMe drive with model number PM981. It has a capacity of 512 GB.


Finally, to remove the graphics card, you will need to remove screws from three locations. The first is near the expansion slots, the second by a bracket near the power connectors along the top of the PCB, and the third at the very end of the card, near the front of the chassis and another small bracket. Once all three screws and brackets have been removed, the MSI NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ventus graphics card can be pulled free of the system.