A good board - very upgradable
Written: Aug 16 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast board, onboard everything, good bios options.
Cons: SATA connections brittle, 1 available fan header, hates crucial ram
The Bottom Line: This board is great for budget PC home user that needs every connection available (Firewire, USB2.0, SATA, etc) or the insane gamer looking at top notch expansion.
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| jasonthoms's Full Review: MSI K7N2G-ILSR (MS-6570G-020) Motherboard |
I purchased this board six months ago and had a few problems getting it up and running.
After replacing the ram with identical crucial ram, it worked very well. THe nforce features are in full force on this board.
On-board -
6 x USB 2.0 ports
2 x Firewire ports
10 100 NIC
Onboard GeForce 4MX AGP 8x, shared dual channel DDR ram - 266 400Mhz RAM
RCA Video Output
5.1 Channel Dolby Surround sound decoding and playback
ATA133 - 2 x standard ports and 1 x single device ATA-133
2 x SATA Connections
4 Diagnostic LEDs on the USB riser
I installed an XP1800 CPU and 2 sticks of PC2700 256MB DDR from Crucial. Now the forums for MSI go on and on about the problems with crucial ram, but the 2nd set I got work fine. Keep that in mind if you're building from scratch - go with another major brand just to be safe.
I decided to use the onboard video instead of my Geforce 2 Ti 32MB. The bios gives me the option of making the onboard video 32-128MB card using onboard memory. The advantage of using the onboard memory is that it's DDR300 and accessed in 2 seperate channels - doubling the speed again.
The board also has an AGP8x slot for better video cards down the road.
The USB 2.0 system consists of 4 USB ports on the motherboard facing back and 2 headers on the motherboard for the front of the case or the riser card included.
XP showes the Firewire port in the LAN connections... but I don't have any firewire devices to test.
The hard drive system is amazing. I took two 40GB ATA-100 drives and purchased SATA adapters and set them up on the motherboard with RAID level 0 - striping.
Effectivly splitting the data up equally into two drives - doubling the speed of access and transfer. The two drives benchmarked at less than 8ms access times and greater than 60MB/sec transfer averages peaking at just under 100MB/sec.
I still had 5 other ATA connections available for CD/CDRW/DVD or other hard drives.
The sound system was great too. 5 channel sound with optical connections. I attached a 5.1 speaker system from logitech and it played games and DVDs in amazing surround sound.
Yesterday, I attempted to add a 160GB drive to an ATA connection. After finding out the bios doesn't recoginize the >137GB drives, I followed the instructions that came with the drive and adjusted the bios settings and hard drive to detect it as a 30GB drive then install special software to instruct windows on how to use the drive.
After making the BIOS adjustments, the motherboard never POSTed again. The diagnotic LEDs show failed to detect floppy. Now the motherboard is RMA'ed with the retail store and I'm happily waiting for a replacement.
I chalk it up to bad luck on my part. This board is solid and with an unlocked CPU it can overclock very well.
With the available adjustments I can purchase next generation ram, cpu, and a video card and increase the front side bus to 400Mhz, utilize the 8x AGP, and really hammer home the benchmarks. But for now, on my budget I could afford a CPU that was using a FSB 300 and DDR that would handle it.
Out of all the PCs I've built, I think this one was the best so far. A challenge caused by Crucial ram or MSI manufacturing, but it worked out in the end. I recommend this board, even with the quirk I've dealt with.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 145
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Epinions.com ID:
jasonthoms
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Member: Jason
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 1 member
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