click to enlarge
Usage
Installation was pretty simple
- there are some niggles as I mentioned before, such as the extreme
right edge of the board not being supported, but nothing major
once you're aware of them. Setting up the testbed was interesting
in itself. I generally use Win98SE for benchmarking - there's
less background stuff going on that with XP, it's quicker and
easier to install but most importantly, our website logs show
us that Win98 is still the preferred platform of our readers.
This trend is changing recently which is probably a good thing
because in my experience this board is not really aimed at Win98
users at the moment. Admittedly, it's still early days for this
product and this chipset so this may improve. Installing Win98
was easy and everything is supported, but I found using the provided
BIOS/driver update utilities problematic under Win98. The drivers
didn't install the "nVidia nForce APU" under Win98,
which is a little system tray tool for adjusting settings (mostly
to do with sound). The latest drivers on the website, while listed
as being 95/98/ME, complain that they aren't being installed under
WinME.
I experimented with this board under Win98 for a while with SiSoft Sandra but was getting pretty inconsistent results. 3DMark also kept crashing under Win98 which I couldn't find a solution for, so eventually I gave up and installed Win2K and decided to use 3DMark2001 as the primary benchmark. Hopefully later chipset drivers for Win98 will sort out those kinds of problems. I'm reluctant to blame the Sandra problems on this board, I've had complaints of inconsistent results from other readers recently too, so until I investigate that further I'm not confident using it to gauge performance - so you won't see any Sandra numbers in this review.
The BIOS has a "High Performance Defaults" setting which works well, but be warned that this sets the board to 133MHz FSB. If you're using a 100MHz FSB CPU, it'll reboot you into a black screen more than likely and require you to clear the CMOS before continuing.
The front-panel connector block is a little annoying.. or rather, the manual's treatment of it is. Rather than dividing the block up into little segments and telling you which connector to put on which segment, it's all done by pin numbers. So power-on is pins 6 and 8, which is a lot less intuitive than simply drawing the block diagram for you like every other motherboard manual in the universe.
I will note that this motherboard is really stable. The only crashes I experienced were during testing of the overclocking limits, 3DMark's strange problem (not a hardware issue) and once when I was playing a game with 3 sticks of RAM installed (I couldn't reproduce this problem). Overall, I've been using the board for a week running countless benchmarks, playing games even using it for a day to organise my digital photo collection which involved a lot of copying of very large image files across the LAN, with no problems. It's been part of my Folding@Home farm too, running continuously for several days in support of the world-leading Team OCAU. I was also surprised by how fast the machine reboots, not that that's any kind of benchmark, but some boards take forever to get their act together before loading the OS.
Overclocking
The major dissapointment for overclockers of this board will be
the lack of multiplier adjustment. There's no nice way to say
it - it's just not there, not in the BIOS and not using dipswitches
on the motherboard. The really hardcore will set the multiplier
using the CPU's bridges, but that's more complex than simply unlocking
the CPU because you need to join and cut specific bridge. A steady
hand and a big toy budget are essential. Anyway, I guess we can
hope that multiplier adjustment is added in some future BIOS upgrade
but for now we're limited to FSB-based overclocking. This is accomplished
via the BIOS, with speeds from 100MHz through to 157MHz with 22
settings to choose from. Note that most FSB's are represented
twice - due to this also being where you set memory speed. Maybe
an image will make it clearer:
There's 22 of those adjustments, but probably only half of them are unique FSB's. I found that using the onboard video allowed for much higher overclocking than having a video card in the AGP slot. I might do a more detailed examination of overclocking this motherboard in a future article and try fiddling with more of the AGP timing but for now the maximum I could get it to boot at is 145FSB with the Asus GF2U installed. Above that it would fail to even POST, with the D-Bracket saying "early chipset initialization" failure. Even 145 wasn't entirely stable, failing to finish booting sometimes. At the next lower setting of 140MHz it was rock-solid and could run CMR2, 3DMark etc with no problems.
However, using the onboard video I could run the board at 154MHz FSB, one step below the maximum. This had my 1.4GHz CPU at 1624MHz and was fine for normal use but I did get one lockup during gaming. The next step down is 147MHz, a smaller jump here would have been nice, but at 1540MHz the system is rock-stable. Because we don't have multiplier adjustment available, it's hard to know if I'm hitting the limit of the CPU or if it's the board failing. I might do another article later, focussing specifically on overclocking this board when I've had a bit more experience with it. For the moment, you can't really call it an overclocker's board. You can overclock with it, but not to a level that will impress most performance enthusiasts.
You'll be pleased to hear that, when you do overclock a little too enthusiastically, the board responds very well to the JBAT1 jumper which clears the CMOS values. Some boards take a fair bit of encouragement to come back to life after you've set them to something silly, but no such problems with this board.
Conclusions
Well, I've come away from this review feeling overall very positive.
For a first try at a motherboard chipset, nForce is a brilliant
effort from NVIDIA. The integrated stuff seems to score mightily
over that included with other chipsets and the chipset itself
seems very fast. There's definitely some niggles but the chipset
has only been out for a month or so - remember, this is the first
and to date only motherboard based on it - and I imagine the wrinkles
will be ironed out with BIOS and driver upgrades over the following
months. In fact, it's highly likely we'll see even more speed
squeezed out of it over the coming months.
Focussing on this MSI motherboard in particular - again, it's impressive with no major complaints. There are some layout niggles which will only bother people as they are assembling a machine and are easily remedied when you're aware of them. The suite of on-board goodies are very capable for most users and it's a very fast, stable board with some overclocking ability. Peripherals Plus have it listed at $375 which is not a huge amount more than the current suite of SocketA DDR motherboards - and you're getting sound, ethernet and a pretty decent video card thrown in!
I know, the performance freaks will be dismayed at the lack of multiplier adjustment, the comparatively low number of FSB adjustments and will want to replace the onboard video. However, even in stock form this is not a slow motherboard and I think for many users it would make a great platform. In fact, my old KT133-based A7V is getting kinda tired these days and I was going to rebuild my main PC around the AMD760-based Gigabyte board. However, now that Peripherals Plus have sent this board along for long-term testing, first thing tomorrow I'm rebulding my desktop PC around it. Decent onboard sound, onboard ethernet and a very fast motherboard that can take the latest CPU's and DDR. Throw in onboard video that's plenty fast for all the games I play and it sounds like exactly what I need. I wouldn't be surprised if many others feel the same way.
 DIY Parallel-Cable Remote LCD! |
 CPU Radiator Zen |
 TwinMOS PC2700 DDR |