A Bargian priced Stability Champ
Written: Dec 08 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Rock solid stability. Supports Coppermine. Can be had for cheap these days.
Cons: Slot 1 means you'll need slot 1 to socket 370 converter to use Intel's FC-PGA chips. No on board Ultra66 or Ultra100 IDE controller.
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| nashrid's Full Review: MSI MS-6163 Pro Motherboard |
The MS-6163 Pro was Microstar's penultimate 440BX solution for the PC enthusiast immediately preceding the BX Master. The BX Master is basically a 6163 Pro with an onboard Ultra66 IDE controller, one additional PCI slot and one additional DIMM slot.
Having used this mother board for almost a year now, I have found no compatibility problems with a large variety of add in cards. The board has had no stability problems even with all 5 PCI slot filled.
This board supports the 1.65V core voltage specification for Intel's Coppermine PIII processors. However, as this is a Slot 1 board, you will need a slot 1 to socket 370 converter to use FC-PGA chips. A nice converter of this type is Microstar's own MS-6905 Master, which supports Coppermine as well.
You can set the core voltage manually in the bios in 0.05 increments. FSB speeds can be manually selected in the bios as well. FSB speeds range from 66MHz to over 150MHz. This helps make the board an adept overclocker. This means that the board will support Coppermine chips with the 133MHz FSB speed. Should you wish to run the board at the 133MHz setting, you should keep in mind that the AGP bus will be overclocked to 89MHz. This is a minor problem as most of the newer AGP video cards do run stable at this speed.
I have had the chance to use a variety of PC100 and PC133 memory on this board and have not encountered any problems so far. The board was able to run certain PC100 memory stably at 133MHz FSB speed at both CL2 and CL3 settings. This is significant since I was not able to duplicate this achievement on other BX boards with the same memory module.
The only glaring shortcoming of this motherboard is that that it has no onboard Ultra66 or Ultra100 IDE controller like some of its competitors. Microstar has answered this shortcoming with the BX Master, but the price of the Master is significantly more than the MS-6163 Pro. However, since I only use SCSI storage devices this is not a problem for me.
This Microstar board is a much better board than any of the BX solutions from Abit. Abit boards are far less stable than this board specially if 2 or 3 of the memory DIMM slots are occupied. The quality of the Microstar boards have been first class for quite some time now. We shouldn't forget that clock for clock, Intel's venerable 440BX chipset is still the fastest solution for P2/P3/Celeron. As a result, I would recommend this board to both overclockers and those looking for a stable BX solution.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
nashrid
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Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 3
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