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Micro
Star International's MS-6309
VIA
Apollo Pro133A - Coppermine Ready Socket 370
Infused
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April
10, 2000 By Dave
Altavilla
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past few months have been very interesting for the
PC Motherboard market. As we all know, Intel
skipped a beat with respect to release of its own
PC133 compatible chipset with the i820. In
the mean time, VIA has begun to show up in almost
every Motherboard Manufacturer's offering, in many
cases as a high end product solution. The
value space has always been a place where VIA
plays well. This time, they are filling the
void at both ends of the spectrum with the Apollo
Pro 133A..
MSI
sent us their recently released VIA PC133 based
motherboard, for evaluation. The MS-6309 has
all the features of a full form factor VIA Apollo
Pro133A based board but instead supports Socket
370 CPUs of all varieties, including Intel's
Coppermine P3. Here is the run down.
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| MSI
MS-6309 Specifications / Features |
| Apollo
Pro133A Socket Rocket - with a
couple of flaws |
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Click
image for full view
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The
Downside:
We might as well get this out of the way early
on. As you can see, the picture above is a
shot of the board installed in our test-bed with a
Golden Orb Cooler, attached to the Coppermine 500E
CPU, we used for testing. There are two
arrows in this shot that are pointing to two major
design flaws with this board.
First is the issue
of being able to clear the CMOS in the event that
you choose a setting that won't boot. The
arrow on the left points to the jumper that clears
the CMOS and restores in to default
settings. MSI really missed the boat with
respect to the mechanical layout of this
board. As you can see, the jumper is located
way down next to a PCI slot that, when occupied,
is totally obstructed making it impossible for you
to change this jumper without having to pull the
card in that slot and most likely the one next to
it. Couple this with the fact that the BIOS
does not have the ability YET, to set the CPU to
default by holding down the insert key while
powering on. Most boards these days have
this option and it is a real benefit to avoid
opening your case if you can't obtain a successful
setting in the BIOS. The jumper issue will
be mostly rectified if MSI can release a BIOS
update that gives you the ability to reset the CPU
to default with a "hot key" at power
up. We have spoken with MSI Marketing about
this and they have promised to give feedback to
engineering on our suggestion.
The second arrow in
this shot is the location of the three pin power
connector for the CPU Fan. You can't see it in
this shot because it is almost totally covered by
the Golden Orb Heat sink. We were able to
get the connector seated with a little
finesse. However, there are many other
places on this board that it could have been used
for the connector site, which would have been much
easier to work around. In addition, there
are only two of these power headers on this
board. One for the CPU fan and one for the
chassis fan.
The Upside:
Now that we have covered these small
inconveniences, lets cover the positive attributes
of this board, as there are many. For
starters, our board came equipped with Direct
Sound AC97 supported audio with the CODEC on board
and a game port. This is not the type of 3D
Positional Audio that the true audiophiles or
heavy gamers are going to want but it is more than
adequate for most folks just looking for decent
stereo output.
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note is this board's Diagnostic LED feature. In
the picture below, you can see that there is a bank of
4 Green LEDs. You can interpret errors that may
be occurring with the board depending on the state of
these, either green or yellow in color. Things
like Memory, VGA BIOS and Processor Initialization are
all monitored.
Click
image for a closer look at the D-LED feature
In
addition, this board has an excellent array of
BIOS set up options and CPU tweaks. You want
details? Right this way....
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Installation,
Setup and Overclocking
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