Crystal A410 Barebone - the MSI way

Written by Stuyo

Thursday, 13 March 2008

 

Page 3 - Assembly

The box that the crystal barebone comes in is bulky and heavy. Everything insde it is packed nicely with enough protective bags and foils. Besides the barebone itself inside we find 5 additional boxes: the big one is the systems stand, another is with nuts and bolts, CD with drivers, power cable and lids for the unused openings, the third is with the processor's cooler. the last two were empty, supposedly they are used if you order a system with additional components or they might just be there to congest :)

This is the main computer body, it will contain the whole computer and monitor, just add mouse and keyboard and you're ready to go. You can see very well all the connector ports and the power button:

We'll add a laptop DVD writer, 80 GB SATA hard drive and 2 GB DDR2 667 CL5 memory.

MSI had provided a very detailed for putting together the whole barebone. It's assumed that you won't read it but at least take look at the pictures - it sure saves time and effort. Let's begin putting it together. Removing the back lid:

We put in the hard drive, the optical drive and remove the protective nets of the processor and the memory so we can see the motherboard:

We install the processor and its cooler:

Inserting the memory isn't exactly comfy, but there is enough place even for people with somewhat bigger fingers, just like me, so there won't be trouble installing it. Closing the last protective grills:

After closing the back lid it's the stand's turn. It's massive and heavy, made out of metal. It can be rotated around its axis. It's kept in place by two bolts and is easily tilted front or back. As whole there is little to be desired more from it - it's beautiful, well matching the overall design, allows for a great freedom and it's very stable. A nice plastic cap is provided too in order to hide the stand's locking mechanism:

Very good impression make the additional covers that are provided: cover for the ODD and the card reader openings, should you have not installed them. There are also provided two white covers in case your ODD is black: