HUGE performance jump from KT266, nice overclocker
Written: Jun 03 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: GREAT performance potential with the right CPU, ALOT of features
Cons: Integrated graphics performance only so-so, NO FSB's over 200
The Bottom Line: ALL the goodies of the nForce2 platform wrapped in a sexy reb PCB. SATA and USB2 support help extend the longevity a tad more than boards without. HIGHLY recommended
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| psykosis_fc's Full Review: MSI K7N2G-ILSR (MS-6570G-020) Motherboard |
I got this motherboard kinda off-the-cuff so to speak, as I was looking for particularly an Epox 8RDA as an nForce2 Ultra400 replacement for the already installed Asus A7V266-E that was actually performing quite well for it's age, but we wanted more-especially since the new Radeon9500Pro, RAM and AthlonXP1800 were showing much promise in the overclocking department.
The A7V foiled our overclocking attempts on several fronts by not having enough frequncy dividers for the AGP/PCI to FSB ratios, not having enough voltage adjustments (and none for the DDR or AGP/IO voltage, pretty much only the CPU), left us with a max FSB of 140Mhz stable giving a CPU speed of a little over 1.6Mhz (11.5x140=1610Mhz). At first, this seemed like the max the CPU would do at this multiplier since the temps were climbing to around 130F using a SwiftechMCX462 and a screaming VantecTornado fan. We were also hesitant to unlock the processor, in part because it's not a quick or simple process for what seemed like a dubious gain at this point. The RAM was purring along happily at even the highest FSB we managed on this mobo at the most aggressive settings that were available - 154MHz at CAS2-2-2-5-1; nothing to sneeze at, and SiSandra was reporting a 97% efficiency of the bus's max theorhetical throughput. Very good there indeed. 3dMark around this point was a tad over 1900 - decidedly less than impressive for this vid card and CPU combo.
So, after battering the system with various utilities and benchmarks, the motherboard seemed to be the weakest link.....so, buh-bye. I was also *very* impressed at the scores floating around the web for the nForce2 boards (and the KT400a's too), particularly the A7N8X and the 8RDA . The Asus seemed to be the board to have, sporting all the goodies but the 8RDA was no slouch either and about $45 cheaper which was the deciding factor between the two.
A trip to Fry's to pick up an 8RDA proved fruitless--they only had one left. It had the "infamous Red Sticker of Death (IRSD[TM]). The sticker also said "missing IO shield--since the nForce2's have decidedly nonstandard rear panels, so we ruled that out immediately. The Asus A7N8XDeluxe was there, but it was $160. We decided on a board that we'd read no reviews on, or really heard of before-the K7N2G. What made us pick this board was;
1)It was red(!) and matched the 9500Pro (blingbling!)
2)it was an nForce2 (although *not* the new nForce2Ultra)
3)It had *WAY* more bundled/included features than any of the other boards that were under $150
4)It was only $99.90 :)
Don't get the impression that a red PCB is a *really* important factor for us, but I *will* say that it definitely made us look more closely at it than if it was the "old" brown-gold color. Plus, bling bling is always nice to have! heheheh. Getting it home and looking through the box, I was pleasantly surprised to see both the amount of included connectors/cables/goodies. Here's a list of features, etc from MSI's website;
CPU
• Supports Socket A for AMD® Athlon™/Athlon™ XP/Duron™
processors @FSB 100/133/166
• Supports 600MHz up to Athlon™ XP 2700 processor or higher
Chipset
• nVIDIA® nForce2 IGP Chipset
- Integrated TV encoder
- Supports DDR266/333 with internal graphic core,
DDR266/333/400 with external add-on card
- AGP 3.0 8x interface at 533MHz
• nVIDIA® nForce2 MCP2 or MCP2-T Chipset
- AC97 Interface supporting up to two concurrent codecs
- Ultra ATA133 for the fastest hard disk throughput
- USB 2.0 EHCI/1.1 OHCI controller
- FireWire® and USB 2.0 for the fastest digital connectivity
(MCP2-T only)
- Audio Processing Unit(APU) encodes audio in Dolby® Digital 5.1
format for full surround sound effects (MCP2-T only)
FSB
100/133/166(200/266/333)MHz clocks are supported.
Main Memory
• Supports six memory banks using three 184-pin DDR DIMMs
• Support Dual channel PC3200/2700/2100/1600 DDR SDRAMs
• Supports both 64-bit and 128-bit DDR SDRAM
• Maximum memory size of 3GB
Slots
• One AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) 1.5V 4x/8x slot
• Five 32-bit PCI bus slots (support 3.3v/5v PCI bus interface)
• One ACR (Advanced Communication Riser) slot
On-Board IDE
• An IDE controller on the MCP2/MCP2-T chipset provides IDE
HDD/CDROM with PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA133/100/66
operation modes
• Can connect up to four IDE devices
Serial ATA Interface (Optional)
• Support 2 serial ATA plus 1 ATA133
- RAID O or 1 are supported
- RAID function works w/ATA133 SATA H/D or 2 SATA H/D
• Connect up to 2 Serial ATA devices and 1 ATA133 device
In-Chip TV-out
• Integrated TV-out encoder, through external bracket
http://www.msi.com.tw/images/product_img/other/mainboard/bracket/tvout.gif - pic of bracket
In-Chip IEEE1394 (Optional)
• nVIDIA MCP2-T IEEE1394 controller
- Support up to two ports via external bracket
http://www.msi.com.tw/images/product_img/other/mainboard/bracket/1394-1.gif - pic of bracket
Audio
• Realtek ALC650 6-channel audio
- Dolby Digital 5.1 format (with MCP2-T option)
Network
http://www.msi.com.tw/images/product_img/other/mainboard/bracket/sbracket-1.gif - pic of bracket
Chipset integrated 10/100 Base-T Ethernet/Fast Ethernet
On-Board Peripherals
On-Board Peripherals include:
- One floppy port that supports two FDD with 360KB, 720KB,
1.44MB and 2.88MB
- 1 serial port and 1 VGA port
- 1 parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode
- 3 audio ports in vertical
- 2 IEEE1394 connectors (Optional)
- 6 USB ports (Rear * 4/ Front * 2)
- 1 RJ-45 jack
BIOS
• The mainboard BIOS provides "Plug & Play" BIOS which detects
the peripheral devices and expansion cards of the board
automatically.
• The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface
(DMI) function which records your mainboard specifications.
Dimension
30.5 cm(L) x 23 cm(W) ATX Form Factor
http://www.msi.com.tw/images/product_img/mbd_img/6570G.jpg - pic of motherboard
All-in-all, pretty much identical to every other nForce2 board out there. What was unique about this particular package was that it includes *ALL* of the add-on connectors--matter of fact, if you use all of them, they take up 5 PCI slot expansion bays and offer all the connectivity you could want, and probably MORE than 90% of you need.
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 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 this thing to last... We got a generic copper heatsink that was chrome plated and had a 72mm fan of dubious efficiency that was quickly replaced by a YSTech TMD fan that also happens to be 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 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 scortching 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)ability 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 - HUUUUGE BONUS!
4)complete and mostly thorough control over the RAM timings; allows for both FAR above normal aggressive timings as well as FAR above normal conservative timings.
All in all, this BIOS had a plethora of options to help wring the most out of the hardware we had--FAR 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 a HUUUUUUGE 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.
The system now proved to be stable at 166FSBx11.9=1909Mhz - a dam good overclock. Previously, the highest FSB attainable on the A7V266 was 152Mhz with 148Mhz stable, already a higher overclock than before, even with a decidedly lower quality HS&F. But honestly, CPU overclocks don't buy you the same performance gains as they used to--FSB does since system IO is now the largest bottleneck in current PC's. We *really* wanted to get those 225 Mhz FSB numbers that we'd been reading about in various hardware reviews, and the thought had us salivating. Back into BIOS and I was met with the 1st dissappointment of the upgrade; 200Mhz was the highest FSB that the board would do. This isn't the highest that the board can go--I don't know what the highest could be, 200 is just the highest setting. What a bummer :)
I set the FSB to 200 and lowered the multiplier to 9 (1800Mhz), because I was pretty confident that I couldn't push the CPU further than I already had and I wasn't quite sure what the rest of the system would do at 200FSB. Booted into Windows noticably snappier than before--matter of fact, all the startup applets and the accompanying systray icons were already there when the desktop came up for the first time--before it would take as long as 15-20seconds for the systray to populate after the desktop came up. Nice. Long story short, after many reboots and trips to the BIOS later, I was able to set the multiplier all the way back to 11x (11.5 would post, but the system would reboot itself once a CPU stressing application was run for any amount of time). For those of you keeping score, that's 200FSBx11=2.2Ghz - that's over a 600Mhz overclock! Amazing. To put that into perspective, an AthlonXP1800 costs $50 today, it's now running like an AthlonXP3200 that costs about $450 - including the cost of this motherboard, that's saving about $300. $300 would just about buy you a Radeon9700Pro, or a 9500Pro and leave with still $100. When people ask "why overclock?", this is the type of example I give them. Hopefully, some of you out there reading this that have bought XP3200's don't feel too sheepish if running at stock speed--and hopefully if you *did* get a 3200, you were able to get just as dramatic a gain.
Onboard Peripherals
Frankly, the onboard sound is *very* good. Not only would I consider it good for an integrated sound solution, IMHO, it's better than a PCI based solution. Running 3dMark03 showed that not only did the soundcard use less CPU cycles than the Creative SBLive!5.1 that it replaced, but it's also capable of running *more* simultaneous DirectX sound streams. Very good sound quality to boot.
the integrated network was more of the same; even less CPU usage than the IntelProShare that it replaced--And I considered the ProShare to be a very good NIC in it's own right.
USB didn't seem good or bad, but the sheer number of additional ports was very welcome. I'm sure getting rid of the external unpowered hubs helped out a bit, if for nothing else than the eased power loading. CPU usage was again, very low.
I did not get a chance to test either the integrated IEEE firewire, nor do I have any plans to. I didn't test the integrated GF4MX either, as this would more than likely be a large step backwards from the Radeon9500Pro that's installed. The onboard vid also uses a shared area of system ram for use as vid ram as well, likely slowing the video performance even more than an AGP version of an MX440 would. Still, it *does* include both composite and SVideo out and coupled with the 9500Pro the system can now drive 2 TV's and 3 monitors if I choose (and had the displays to hook to it!), without much effort. I very nice and welcome benefit. All told, I don't think the integrated graphics would be that bad of a performer for most people, really. The chipset as reviewed elsewhere does provide acceptable game performance for all but the core gaming market and IMHO is a very valuable and cost effective inclusion. From another perspective, to buy a video card of the same performance as a standalone item would most likely cost you around $50 representing exactly half of the total cost of this motherboard. See my point?
SATA and IDE
Surprising that this board will do *both* PATA133 and SATA150 RAID0, I'm not sure of the exact combinations, nor whether you can span/stripe an ATA133 and SATA, drive, but it's interesting nonetheless. Included on the mobo are *3* ATA133 headers meaning you could drive a 4 drive UDMA133 array and still have your DVDRom and CDR burner. There are also 2 SATA headers, but I understand the controller is limited to a single drive per channel. Since I have yet to actually buy any SATA drives, this isn't much of a concern--and since most SATA drives are over 100GB and I haven't filled up the 80GB i've got, I'm even less concerned. Still, it's a welcome addition, and nice to have the option.
Software Bundle
The box came with 2 CD's - one with drivers and one with the 6channel version of PowerDVD (one of the best software DVD players IMHO). The drivers installed cleanly without a fuss, and included several utilities included a LiveUpdate type of app that updates everything from the BIOS to the drivers to the utilities themselves, and is a WELCOME addition. Being somewhat "old school", I'm fairly wary of BIOS flashes in general. Even more wary of "live" bios flashing within Windows - double that under a non-DOS version of Windows! The BIOS flashing program couldn't be easier or work better thankfully, having found it's own update and flashing itself within windows with very good (and reassuring) status messages while in progress. The BIOS flash also informed me that the temp reporting was also bad--making me feel even better about the heatsink.
There were several other utilities included including a WMI browser, Windows Process browser, hardware monitor along with the usual ADOBE and other goodies. All in all, pretty useful to both the novice and veteran enthusiast and certainly a more robust pack-in than I expected.
Conclusion
While I was somewhat dissappointed that I couldn't get even more FSB numbers, in reality the system turned out to be a screamer! The dissappointment was probably more due to me getting greedy after getting so much out of it--still, I wonder how much further the rest of the system could go given the ability for higher FSB's. What of the generic heatsink you ask? Well, actually it's turning out to be not as bad as I had feared. As previously mentioned, a BIOS flash fixed the temp reporting issue, and the system putters along at around 45c - still hotter than I'm used to, but it's completely stable. The system is due to get liquid cooled in the near future, so I'm not overly concerned about it now. The red PCB sure looks handsome with the addition of some nice blue anodized heatsinks on the matching red Radeon and DDR memory - blingbling! heheh. The system has proven to be very stable, without a single lockup once I had settled on some BIOS settings. Performance has also taken a HUGE leap thanks to the higher than normal overclock, with 3dMark scores going from under 2,000 to over 4,550--Like the Radeon itself, this was a very dramatic performance improvement in a single upgrade and I dare to say $100 well spent in this instance. I'm fairly confident that the features that make this motherboard exceedingly feature-rich and a great, stable overclocker are present in most if not all nForce2 motherboards. What sets the MSI apart IMHO, is the inclusion of a mind-boggling number of expansion ports, a spiffy-red PCB and color-coordinated connectors. I'm just as confident that the "new" C1 stepping of the nForce2 is even better, most definately allowing for even higher FSB speeds and the same stability. I'm also confident that this board will be phased out in the near future because of the new nForce2 stepping, which will drive the price of this board down even further--that is, if you can live with a "measely" 200Mhz FSB.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99.90
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Epinions.com ID:
psykosis_fc
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Member: Jeff
Location: Pasadena, CA
Reviews written: 42
Trusted by: 22 members
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