The system went together pretty easily last night. The board itself is amazingly well layed-out and as far as I can tell very stable. The onboard sound is EXCELLENT. I'm used to cheesy onboard sound like found on most boards with integrated sound, but this is truely incredible. It has at least the sound quality of a SB Live! Platinum, absolutely crystal clear with no audible background hiss that I could detect. In addition the CPU utililization of the sound system is almost 0%, meaning hardware accelerated, rather than software driven like AC 97 codec onboard sound found on most boards with built-on sound.
I did end up with a bad stick of ram, but thanks to the nice little diagnostic LEDs that was easily tracked down. Unfortunately that means I have to make a "house call" tommorow night to install the replacement stick.
MSI really gives you a lot in the package:
2 USB add on cards (one has the dianostic leds)
1 ATA 100 ribbon
1 Floppy ribbon
1 CNR riser card with the SPDIF (Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio output and connections for front and rear speaker pairs). This can be used in addition to the standard three audio inputs and outputs.
Other nice things:
Lots of room around the processor socket for large heatsinks.
CPU socket is near the edge of the board, meaning if you slip when attaching the heatsink (which usually requires a screwdriver), you won't poke a hole in the board.
IDE connectors were literally 3 inches from the hard drive.
ATX power connector very close to the top of the board (good for a full tower case).
USB extra headers are near the lower front of the board and the extra port cards supplied have long cables. (Front of case USB ports would be easy to get to.)
PC speaker is built on.
Since the chipset doesn't require it's own fan you don't have to worry about that fan going out.
The bios has the option to shut down the system if the CPU temp gets too high. (You set the temp.)
The COM 2 connector on the motherboard is about a 1/2 inch from PCI slot 3, so if you need a second COM port you can just use the little add-a-port cards.
As soon as the system detects all the components the system has for the first time, the system POSTs and begins loading Windows in about 1 second after the system is powered on. (Speeds up boot time.)
The AGP slot has a latching clip to secure the AGP card. (Eliminates the annoying tendancy of the AGP card to pop out of its slot when tightened.)
MSI's CD included has the chipset driver (AGP, sound, USB, etc). A plus is only 1 chipset driver is needed. No 4 in 1 drivers on this board.
Next is the integrated video driver (which was just the standard Detonator drivers, as it's just a GF 2 Mx built on.) Also on the CD is DX 8.0a, an antivirus program, fuzzy logic (fsb minor overclocking utility), PC temp and fan monitoring utility, and a bios and driver autoupdater (which I would never actually allow to flash my bios in Windows
). I think Acrobat Reader was also on there.
There was one minor thing that I noticed. The picture quality of the onboard video was not quite a good as a stand-alone video card. If you were at 1024x768 res you could notice just the slightest amount of bluring in the corners of the screen. At 800x600 this wasn't present. Unfortunately I could not test at 1280x960 as the customer's 17" monitor would not allow it. Other than that, it performs just like a standard GF 2 MX (supports all modes and refresh rates as any other 32 MB GF 2 MX 400 card). Most people would never even notice if they weren't looking for it specifically. (Perhaps fixible with newer drivers or bios??? )
Another possible turn off for some users is the lack of multiplier adjustment, and thus the potential for serious overclocking. This IMO is a fair trade for the rock solid stability this board seems to have (and reviews have stated it has).
The onboard sound does not yet support EAX (Creative's standard) surround, but newer drivers will add support for this I'm sure.
The board only has the 2 IDE channels. (IE no onboard Promise or Highpoint RAID controller is built on.) For most users this isn't something to worry about. If it had the integrated RAID controller the cost of the board would be significantly higher.
All USB peripherals I had to test (wireless M$ mouse and USB printer) worked perfectly.
Now that all that is said I did run into one thing: After AOL 7.0 was installed (it hurt me to do it
), after AOL dialed up and tried to get its access numbers the system would totally lockup.
Updating the modem drivers (Diamond Supra model SUP2750 ) had no effect. I've determined the fault is AOL's software, which was not a big surprise. MSN worked perfectly, as did my dial-up account, which I used to download the modem driver. I've ran into this exact problem with AOL 5.0 and certain versions of Internet Explorer, but I would have assumed AOL might have actually removed *some* bugs from their terrible software.
The fact that MSN works pretty much eliminates the computer hardware. As usual, AOL modified the TCP/IP protocols and changed Internet Explorer's logo and window title, which I fixed. All the cute little junk shortcuts on the desktop like "Refer a Friend and get $$$", "FREE instant messenger", and "AOL broadband" that AOL needlessly adds to the start menu AND desktop were annoying too.
(Friends don't let friends use AOL... )
On the plus side the customer called me today and said just how impressed he was with the system. (He said, "It's like going from walking to work to driving a Ferrari.")
Unless you are an overclocker, I highly recommend this board! Simple install, stable, and very fast. The single driver, rather than 4 like VIA chipsets, is very convienent. The onboard video uses the standard Detonator drivers. The onboard GF 2 MX, Dolby Digital 5.1 capable sound, and integrated ethernet (100base) are also VERY nice and work well, and can be easily turned off in the bios.
If I were to do another AMD system for a customer I would use this board again without any regrets or hesitation. At first I was worried that perhaps the board would have problems as a result of being so new and with only one set of drivers and bios version 1.0, but those fears have been removed. (I'm also guessing that since nVidia itself designed the chipset, they might actually be able to get AGP 4x with Sidebanding and FastWrites to work.
) If you want to build a stable AMD based system this board is an EXCELLENT choice IMO. (This board has few overclocking features besides minimal FSB tweaking and RAM timing options though... )
(As a bit of a side note I've found out that the XBox game console uses this EXACT chipset, but with integrated GeForce 3 graphics and a P3 733 Mhz processor. I find it kind of ironic that Intel refused to allow nVidia to adapt the nForce to work with the P4, as the memory bandwidth on this board is actually far superior to EVEN RAMBUS PC 800 Ram when in dual channel mode! (4.2 Gb/s vs 3.2 Gb/s) The nForce would actually be the perfect OEM Intel P4 board if Intel were to allow nVidia to use the P4 bus. It's a good thing for AMD that Intel makes it's own chipsets and is very greedy about allowing others to build Intel supporting chipsets. )
