Introduction

Want to build a gaming PC on a budget? What sort of case, motherboard, power supply, and DVD player can you buy for $300? How about adding a cooler? If these are the sorts of questions you are asking yourself, I have the perfect answer. If you aren't, I have to ask whether you understand what's going on in PCs lately? Performance increases seem meager and unexciting? GPU releases boring? Marketing has failed you. With the help of MSI, I'm here to tell you why...

Within the past couple years, we've seen a huge change in hardware, but very little changes in software requirements, a few select new titles withstanding. Although we have a new Windows OS and a new version of the mighty DirectX, there doesn't seem to be much fanfare this time around about what's offered lately. If you look at new CPU reviews, they aren't that interesting as most note that Intel's latest move into DDR4 technology hasn't brought much added performance. SATA Express is barely used, USB 3.1 is as fast as can be, and M.2 HDD's are now topping 2500 MB/s. With all these things also comes a huge drop in power usage, especially with NVidia's latest GPUs. An NVidia GTX980 can happily churn out those pixels at right around 200W. Gone are GPUs that burn up PCs and need 700W PSUs.

Take all this and put it together and you have an ultra-fast platform that is also affordable. MSI's GAMING engineers have taken it all and stuffed it into a tiny 10 liter box called the Nightblade MI2. That's far less than a square foot. You can install a GTX970, a very capable card for those users with 1920x1080 monitors and a decent option at 2560x1600. You can install Intel's latest i7-6700K (although I'd recommend the 65W i7-6700 non-K chip), 32 GBs of RAM, that blazing fast M.2 SSD, and a couple 4 TB mechanicals and another 1 TB SSD for more fast storage should you so choose. With overclocking left alone by using Intel's B150 chipset, you can have it all and stay within the provided PSU's 350W. Yep, all that can be powered quite easily with less than 350W being pulled from the wall socket. Enter MSI's Nightblade MI2.

Packaging

As a fully-capable PC platform, the MSI Nightblade MI2 arrives in a fairly large box given its relatively small size. This box has exactly what I like all over it—pictures of the actual product, the name, and not much else. The rear has a bit of feature highlighting.


Upon flipping open the origami top, you are greeted by a lot of foam. Heavy, thick, dense foam. Take out the foam and the Nightblade MI2 will show itself, wrapped in a plastic bag, a small cardboard box with accessories off to one side.

Contents

There doesn't need to be a lot of stuff here, and MSI only included the power cable, driver disc, and several manuals. A complete list is below:

• User's manuals
• 1 x MSI Nightblade barebones PC
• 1 x Power adapter (regional)
• 1 x Driver disc
• 1 x Thermal paste
• 1 x Bag of VGA support sponges

The inclusion of some foam pads for you to attach to your VGA to prevent grounding issues as well as a bit of thermal paste are nice touches; the thermal paste will be a must for most users while only a few graphics cards will need these foam pads.