MSI Hermes 650-P Barebones System Review

These days computers cannot be just fast and powerful, they also have to be small and packed full of features. The MSI Hermes Barebones system is not quite as small as some of the other SFF systems out there, but it's certainly slimmer than regular mid tower computers. The system when installed with a CPU and hard drive is perfect as a home theatre, or bookshelf PC. The Hermes is powerful enough for everyday computing as well. We're going to be taking the MSI Hermes for a spin today and be giving you our $0.02. The barebones Hermes is based around the SiS 650 chipset and that means it supports Socket 478/400 MHz FSB Celeron/Pentium 4 processors. The SiS 650 chipset does not support the newly released 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 processors. As you may have guessed, because this is a Small Form Factor (SFF) PC, everything is integrated, integrated, integrated! On board goodies include analog video as well as DVI so you can connect a CRT or LCD monitor up easily, TV and S-Video outputs, 5.1 audio, 10/100 LAN for networking, a MS memory card reader, USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394. If you need to add onto that, there are two horizontal 32-bit PCI slots off of a riser card which will support most devices as long as they are not too large. Round front there are two PCMCIA slots which can come in handy for devices like WLAN adaptors. Lastly the two DIMM's support up to 2GB of PC1600/2100 DDR.