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Micro
Star International's MS6309
VIA
Apollo Pro133A - Coppermine Ready Socket 370
Infused
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April
10, 2000 By Dave
Altavilla
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| Test
System Specifications / Features |
| Standard
issue performance rig |
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Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 500E
overclocked to 600 and 750MHz. (supplied by Outside
Loop Computers),
MS-6309
Motherboard, 128MB of EMS PC133 SDRAM, WD Expert
AC418000 7200 RPM ATA66 Hard Drive, Elsa Erazor X2
AGP , Kenwood 72X CDROM,
Win 98SE,
DirectX 7.0a
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| MS-6309
Installation / Setup |
| Tons
O' Fun! |
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| The
MS-6309 setup quickly and easily in our test-bed
system. It was nice to just plunk the FCPGA
down into the Socket without having to deal with
Slotket. It brought me back to the days of the
original Pentium. The board posted at 500MHz.
and we quickly went into the BIOS for some
tweaking. It is not the standard Award BIOS
that you may be use to seeing on BX based
boards. Instead, it is an AMI BIOS and it is
every bit as good in our opinion.
CPU
BIOS Setup
Click image
Much to my delight,
the board comes with the ability to run the Front
Side Bus speed all the way up to 200MHz. The
question is, will you be able to run a processor at
this speed. There is also a comprehensive
health monitoring menu in the BIOS for temperature
and voltage. In addition, MSI gives you the
ability to adjust CPU Core Voltage here. One
little note of concern was the fact the the VCore
reading was consistently reporting different numbers
than what we had set it to. The system never
had any issues related to this but it didn't give me
a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Now, if you could
find a CPU that would run on a 200MHz. Front Side
Bus, the MS-6309 would take care that your SDRAM was
running in check. Since the VIA Apollo PRO133A
has the ability to run the SDRAM clock
asynchronously to the Front Side Bus, you can be
assured stable operation at the standard 133MHz.
spec.
There are a number of
important features here including the ability to
toggle AGP 4X on or off, IOQ Depth and the SDRAM
Clock adjustment, which can be either PC100 or
133. The RAM we used ran at PC133 or 133MHz
with a CAS2 setting and stable. These settings
proved to be THE fastest configuration that we have
seen to date with a VIA Apollo Pro133A board, when
it comes to memory bandwidth. Details on this
to follow.
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| Overclocking
With The MS-6309 |
| Not
too shabby but room for improvement |
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With all of the
flexibility that the MS-6309's BIOS affords, we were
anxious to see if we could get our P3-500E to new
heights. We were able to overclock the CPU to
a max of 143MHz. FSB for a total of 715MHz.
This particular processor has been proven at 750MHz.
(150X5) in a couple of other boards, so we were a
little disappointed here. When the FSB was set
higher than 143, the system wouldn't post. This was
the case no matter what voltage setting we
used. Again, with another BIOS release from
MSI, this can be easily rectified as the settings
are all there ready for use.
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| What
really impressed about this board was its
performance clock for clock versus other boards in
this field. Let's take a look! |
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Performance,
Benchmarks and the Rating
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