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The stand is a thing of beauty, constructed of thick plastic in the same finish as the Titan's front. Rubber pads everywhere it touches ensure you'll never mark the case or any surface you put it on. The stand provides support for the entire unit, but the only parts you can see are two fins that extend about three centimetres to the sides and are about half as deep as the case itself. Consequently, you can choose to have it visible towards the front or the back of MSI's miniature machine. The excellent stand just makes it more of a pity that when upright, the Titan 700's top is so unattractive, due to the aforementioned visible cables.

In terms of noise, despite MSI's claimed maximum of 35dB(A), I found the machine to be annoyingly audible, certainly more so than an Acer Aspire L320 I had running beside it. Considering the older Aspire packs far better specifications into a case of similar volume, this is rather disappointing, though to be fair the Titan stays just slightly cooler under typical use. Nearly all of that noise is caused by the single 40mm fan which cools the 2GHz VIA C7 ULV (ultra low voltage) processor. Things look up when you consider power usage, as the 60W integrated PSU is indicative that the little black box has the average power consumption of a light bulb. But then the VeryPC GreenPC manages a roughly similar power draw on more powerful specifications.


When it comes to entertainment, it's clear that MSI isn't joking when it pitches the Titan mainly as a business platform, and any mention of the 700 as a "living room PC" ought to be taken with a very large grain of salt. The machine just about coped with a 720P .AVI high definition movie trailer - as long as nothing else was running in the background - but trying a .MOV file at the same resolution under Media Player Classic turned into a slideshow (though it's worth noting that ordinary SD video runs without a hitch).

Gaming is even less feasible, as the integrated VIA/S3 Unichrome IGP Pro graphics chip only produced a paltry 9.42 frames per second at 640 x 480 with all settings at minimum in TrackMania Nations Forever - hardly an intensive game in the first place. Another disadvantage to this chip is that it appears to support a maximum resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 (1,280 x 800 widescreen), so you won't be able to run most 24in monitors at native resolution.

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