Installation was as straightforward as installing any other motherbord, but I was honestly surprised to see how much smaller physically this mobo is. Especially when you consider the sheer number of integrated items. It's about the same height as the normal ATX fare, but about 4" less accross. Another surprise (kinda) was this motherboard did *not* include the 4 holes for mounting heatsinks meaning the SwiftechMCX462 could not be used. We toyed with the idea of epoxying the heatsink directly to the CPU, but that would mean the 1.5lb weight of the heatsink would be solely supported by the core and most likely not a good idea if we wanted the core to stay attached... We got a generic copper heatsink from the Nearby CompUSA. On the upside, it was chrome plated--The downside what that it had a 72mm fan of dubious efficiency. As luck would have it, there was a YSTech TMD fan laying around, making the whole HS&F chrome--more blingbling! We'll have to see if it's adequate at cooling the thing at stock speeds, let alone allow an overclock later in the review. It does look pretty cool all chrome on the red PCB though.
Setup
1st thing I did after powering up was to go into the BIOS and look at the temp in the HW
monitoring menu - CRIPES! The CPU was running at a scorching 63c! It didn't climb any further,
but that is the single highest temp I've *ever* recorded with any CPU! Most of the time I'm around
32c with the Swiftech... A quick venture into the case to put my highly calibrated and patented
"index finger temp probe" to use and was quite surprised to find the heatsink almost at room
temperature. A few more tests verified that the BIOS's CPU temp reading was off. Good news at
this point.
After quickly running through most of the BIOS setup options and setting up items that are in my
mental checklist like disabling the floppy and ports that won't be used, setting ACMI stuff and other
pedestrian options, I was ready to boot up at stock speeds; 133FSBx11.5=1530Mhz-the stock
AthlonXP1800 speed. BIOS restarted just fine, and I knew there was alot more overhead in just
about every major component, so I immediately went back into the BIOS to start overclocking and
finish setting up all the options. The first reboot also showed another nifty feature; a fullscreen
graphic with the MSI AGP8x logo - kinda a nifty touch.
Running through the BIOS options more thoroughly, I discovered several things;
1) Memory dividers that allowed both over and underclocking the memory bus relative to the FSB -
VERY good feature.
2) Aability to either lock the AGP bus to 66Mhz or overclock in 1Mhz increments up to 120Mhz
3) AUTOMATICALLY unlocks the AthlonXP CPU allowing the selection of ANY multiplier that
the mobo supports - HUGE BONUS!
4) Complete and mostly thorough control over the RAM timings; allows for both FAR above normal
aggressive timings as well as FAR below normal conservative timings.
All in all, this BIOS had a plethora of options to help wring the most out of the hardware we
had - more than any other board I've seen come with, and gave me alot more settings to play
with than i've done before. It still remained to be seen how much this would help in overclocking at
this point, but the final result is an excellent overclock that I really didn't expect - more details
to follow on this.
After many, many reboots trying to find the limit of various components, I found another very
nice feature; "safe mode" FSB jumpers. While in the process of clearing the CMOS for the 5th
or so time to undo a crazy setting, I broke out the manual to find out what the other jumpers were
since I was getting close to being ready to boot into windows and setup the new hardware and I was
thinking that I might need to jumper something to disable onboard items that weren't going to be
used or something I'd missed.....turns out that there's a jumper to lock the FSB to 100Mhz. This is a
handy thing if yer overclocking - see, everytime you clear the CMOS, all the settings need to be
redone. I've just about memorized most BIOS setups and settings, but it still takes a bit to go
through every item and change. What the 100FSB lock does is allow you to change what you've
done to cause the machine to not POST (RAM timings, too high an FSB or whatever), *without*
having to completely clear the CMOS--NEAT! Saved ALOT of time getting the thing optimized
and by far the most useful thing I've seen yet for the enthusiast. Kudos to MSI!
After running through the "standard" settings (non-overclocked) to see if it would boot to Windows,
I discovered that WinXP would hang right at what seemed like the userinit portion of boot. I was
thinking maybe this was a heat issue with the CPU, since the BIOS readings of the temp were
abnormally high, and the unknown heatsink we were using. I restarted in Safe Mode and it showed
that the startup halted while loading MUP.sys - this module contains pretty much hardware core of
Kernel32.sys and includes things like the WMI hardware properties and most importantly the IRQ
routing schema. Disabling all of the goodies in BIOS didn't aleviate the problem either. Ahah! I
quickly reinstalled WinXP using the recovery option (took a blazing quick 12min start to finish) and
all was well. Apparently WinXP didn't like the radical hardware change--understandable
considering both the amount of different hardware and the diffferent architecture/ACMI table of the
motherboard.
Thanks to Kyle at [H]ard|OCP for allowing us to borrow his BIOS shots.
