The case comes with a Power Man 180W power supply is compatible with P4 motherboards and has three molex and one floppy drive power connectors. There is an exhaust fan just above the CPU socket area which is great for expelling hot air. For additional cooling, MSI has added a auxiliary 80mm Top Power DC fan which pushes 20 CFM at 2200 RPM. Because of the close proximity of the power cables, it would have been nice if MSI were to install a fan grill as well.

CPU cooling is taken care of by an OEM AVC 112C83 Aluminum heatsink with copper core. The 60x60x15mm fan pushes 19 CFM and is rated to cool up to an AthlonXP 2600+. During testing the test AthlonXP 2700+ (clocked at XP 2100+ 13x133 MHz speeds) did not pass 55 degrees Celsius even under load.

Like the auxiliary fan, we would have liked to see MSI place a 60mm fan guard on top of the CPU fan as well because there are a lot of wires in close proximity that could be damaged.

With the case being 42 CM deep, this allows you to install the CD-ROM, HDD and floppy drives without interfering with the motherboard.

The front panel of the case is very clean. The top piece of plastic hides the CD-ROM/floppy. On the lower right hand corner, there are also two front panel USB 2.0 ports. The main power LED is located in the middle of the power button and is a very bright blue colour (which looks very cool). The HDD activity LED is silver/white in colour.

There's an intake vent just for fresh air just above the CPU socket on the the top side of the case as well as an exhaust vent on the right hand side panel. Obviously you would not want to block either vents, and since this side vent is dome you will be unlikely to set up the computer upside down with this vent at the bottom. During our testing the exhaust air was quite hot so maintaining proper ventilation with an AMD AthlonXP system is important for reliability.

Other then the smaller size of everything, the rear of the Metis 266 looks just like a normal computer. There we have our power connector, the two PS/2's, four USB 2.0 ports, a serial and parallel port as well as VGA connector from the integrated ProSavage8 videocard, a 10/100 NIC and the AC'97 codec's audio ports.