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10-Dec-01 - Review by James "Agg" Rolfe The first thing most people are going to notice about this motherboard is the colour. MSI have used a very bright, almost pinky red PCB that they are using for a few of their new motherboards lately. This of course has no performance effect (unlike cars, red motherboards don't go faster) but is a pure branding/marketing gimmick. It certainly attracts attention, though - I used a picture of this board in my recent Macase KA-230 Midtower review and despite naming the board in the review I still got plenty of email asking what the cool red motherboard was.  click to enlarge - 152kb Note that this motherboard is not quite full ATX width and therefore doesn't have the extreme right side backplate mounting holes. This is a major issue to me, as there are a lot of connectors on the unsupported part of the board. For example, when pushing RAM into any of the slots, the board will flex alarmingly due to not being supported on the extreme right side. This sounds minor, but over-flexing can lead to broken traces and other almost undetectable damage to the motherboard. Note the IDE connectors are out on the edge too and suffer the same problem. You could use a small plastic support as found with some cases or simply use your fingers to support the edge of the board when you apply any force to those connectors. It sounds simple but I've seen this stuff kill motherboards before. Another unusual feature is the separation of the DIMM slots into 2 groups with a gap between them. DIMM1 is out on its own - from memory, this was the same on the nForce reference boards so I can only assume it's something to do with the TwinBank memory feature. Anyway, we'll look at the memory configuration in a little more detail later on in this review. The next stand-out feature is the North Bridge or, as we learned earlier that NVIDIA call it, the nForce IGP. It's rotated 45 degrees from what we normally expect. This isn't the first time MSI have done this however, they did it on some of their KT133 and KT133A motherboards recently.  click to enlarge In the picture above, you can see a few things worthy of note. Firstly the small-footprint but tall-finned northbridge heatsink and the bizarre way it's mounted. No sign of any standard chipset cooler mounting holes here, so not much chance of using standard coolers as per our comparison from a few months ago. It's also too small to use even a 40mm 486-heatsink-type fan if you decided it wasn't cooling enough. That said, even when overclocking the motherboard a fair way, the heatsink didn't get particularly warm. If someone does start making aftermarket coolers there's a bit of a job getting the stock unit off, anyway. I did wrestle with some long-nose pliers for a while in an attempt to remove the heatsink - that long arm sits under 2 loops firmly affixed to the board and, while I could get one end out easily enough, the heatsink is glued down with some kind of strong (hopefully thermal) adhesive which prevented my rotating or lifting the heatsink off. I decided in the interest of being able to continue testing I wouldn't be too brutal and left it as is. Note also in the picture above, the little arm on the end of the AGP slot. I've not seen that before but it's actually quite useful for levering the end of a video card's AGP connector clear of the slot. BTW, the AGP slot is one of the more modern ones that WON'T work with older 3.3v 1X AGP devices - in fact, manual contains a stern warning that using them will damage the motherboard. We heard of this recently and discussed it on the news page here for a while and there were plenty of reports of fried motherboards. However, on this particular board, I can't imagine people forgoing the onboard GF2 in preference for an old 1X AGP card so it shouldn't be an issue. There's a lot of space beneath the AGP slot - I'm not sure why, but from memory the reference boards had it too. The board is basically missing a PCI slot due to this space which has silkscreening, some large capacitors and solder pads for mounting a chip - a little too small (and weirdly positioned) to be a RAID controller (and there are no spaces marked for the extra IDE headers required). Due to its location you'd have to assume it's something to do with video - perhaps related to the "TV-Out Daughter Card (Optional)" mentioned on MSI's stats page. In fact, there's quite a lot of mysterious silk-screening on the PCB, but much of it is over-written or has components mounted over the top of what seems to be an older layout. For example there are marked spaces and solder spots for a couple more fan headers, but they are far from the actual headers. A front-panel connector block is marked out normally, but the actual connectors do not align to the silkscreening and are not in the same order. The board is marked KN7420 PRO REV 1.0 so it seems strange that there are obvious layout changes. Two major niggles about the board layout - the PSU connector and the CPU socket placement. In a midi- or full-tower the CPU socket placement will be fine, but in a mini-tower it's nearly impossible to get to the top heatsink lug on the socket due to the power-supply being in the way of fingers and screwdrivers etc. The PSU connector I had to think about for a while before deciding I didn't like it. Many boards have it in the top left corner like this one and I know many people don't like it because it requires the ATX power cable to route over the CPU socket - especially one where the socket is as high up as on this board. However I generally find in most cases you can easily cable-tie the ATX power cable to the mid-case rail or a ventilation space on the back of the case which means the ATX cable is now tucked nearly away in the top left with the PSU. However, on this motherboard, due to the extra width of the USB connector housing (because of the RJ45 connector shown below), it's really fiddly to get the ATX power connector to disengage. You need to get your finger right down next to it to unclip the retaining tab, which is difficult to do when so close to the back of the USB/RJ45 housing. Obviously, most people are not going to connect and disconnect their ATX power cable too often, but it's still an area for improvement.  click to enlarge When you look at the ATX backplate you realise how much is onboard with this unit. At far left we have the normal keyboard and mouse ports, next to those are the normal USB ports but notice the RJ45 connector above them. This is of course for the 10/100Mb Ethernet built into the chipset. Continuing right we have COM1 and the pink parallel port, but next to COM1 is the blue female SVGA connector for the onboard GF2-based video. The motherboard has a connector for a COM2 cable but no such cable is provided. Finally at right is a yellow/orange block of connectors containing the 3 phono jacks for the onboard audio (Line Out, Line In and Mic) and the game port for joysticks etc.  click to enlarge Thermal monitoring is provided by a flexible flat probe within the socket. This presses firmly enough against the back of the CPU to lift it from the socket when the locking arm is raised. The motherboard also includes three 3-pin fan headers and a "system temperature" sensor, the location of which I'm unsure of. I had no trouble getting MBM v5.1.0.2 to report both temperatures and all 3 fan speeds. Anyway, on the next page we'll cover the extra bits included in the MSI package. Other Recent Reviews:
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