|
 |
|
Quality and Setup of the MSI 648 Max |
| This
648 is all "maxed" out with goodies |
|
As with all recent MSI
offerings, the 648 Max has a red PCB which
really looks nice in a modified case with an open window.
Starting from the lower left corner, there were two
IDE ports, each supporting two ATA 66/100/133 devices
and a floppy drive connection. They are mounted
perpendicular the edge right edge of the board, which keep the cables from restricting
airflow from intake fans mounted at the front of a case.
The two IDE channels are controlled by the nearby SiS 963 Southbridge.
Along the edge of the board are all of the requisite
headers for the power and reset switches are also
visible.
Personally, I wish that the motherboard companies
would get together with case makers, and simply
standardize these connections so that one plug could be
used for all of the individual switches and LEDs.
Rather than finding each plug, and then figuring out its orientation. Other headers for front panel
USB and audio jacks can also be found here.
Headed to the next corner
of the 648 Max,
there are 6 PCI slots, enough to handle any kind of
add-in card, as well as the AGP 4x/8x slot with its
retention clip. Past the slots are the various
chips for the onboard audio and LAN, and the CD-in
header. The small chip with the crab on it is
the RealTek ALC650 audio codec that provides 6
channels of audio when combined with the optional
S-Bracket. While it does a pretty good job,
audiophiles and gamers alike will probably still opt
for an add-in card. One addition, that is
sure to raise some eyebrows, is the Broadcom BCM5702
chip which offers Gigabit LAN (10/100/1000)
supporting full / half duplex capabilities at all speeds
and Wake-On-LAN.
Next, we have the power
array and I/O ports. The bulk of the capacitors
and MOSFETs can be found here, two of which are cooled
somewhat by a heatsinks shown in the last picture
above. I'm all for extra bells and whistles on a
board, and if cooling these two voltage regulators
allows for a more stable board, then we're all for it. The back of the board has connections for
a PS/2 mouse and keyboard, 2 serial ports, 1 parallel
port, 4 USB 2.0 ports, the RJ-45 LAN jack and 3
color-coded audio connections for line-out, line-in,
and mic-in. These same jacks are converted to 4
or 6 channel audio output connectors when selecting the
appropriate settings in the audio software utility.
That means you can skip the optional S-Bracket, yet
still get 6 channels of audio using the three provided
jacks on the board.
The Northbridge was
covered by a passive metallic green heatsink, that
advertises the AGP 8x support. This is not as
effective as a heatsink with a fan, but it does not
require another power connection and is obviously quieter
because there is no fan! By the way, SIS'
reference 648 motherboard did not have any cooling on
the Northbridge whatsoever. We would have liked
to have seen at least 3
or 4 of fan headers on the 648 Max, but in its current
state
there are only two fan headers on this board. The
12V ATX connection was on the far side of the CPU,
which is not
necessarily the most convenient location. In
fact, it was hidden right next to the CPU bracket,
close to on of the heatsinks found in the power array. The 20-pin ATX power connection
was on the far side of the DIMM slots, which
conversely was placed in a great position, as it did
not interfere with adding or removing items, and did
not impede any airflow over the CPU cooler. There were 3 DIMM slots
supporting 1GB of DDR SDRAM each, for a grand total of 3GB
of RAM.
THE BIOS:
The 648 Max used an AMI
BIOS that offered all the necessary options for
enabling and disabling devices, but was a little light
on the tweaking side. From the Main menu,
we accessed the Advanced BIOS features, which seemed
to have fewer options than we are accustomed
to seeing, but it covered the basics well enough. The
Advanced Chipset page left much to desire. The
only options we found here were for AGP aperture
size, CAS latency and two memory frequency
options. We could not manually tweak any of the
memory settings, being limited to safe, normal, fast,
turbo, and ultra settings. My first inclination was
to set the memory to turbo, because we were using high
quality Corsair memory, which unfortunately led to some
problems overclocking, as you'll see later on. There also
weren't any advanced AGP options, such as
enabling or disabling Fast Writes or changing the AGP
mode.
On the next screen, we
could set the IRQ and DMA settings for the attached
devices as well as enable or disable the on-board
audio, LAN, and USB. The PC Health Status
allowed us to check on the voltages and fan speeds, as
well as the CPU and System temperatures, but did not
offer any overheating protection or automatic shutdown
settings. Finally, on the Frequency/Voltage control
menu, we were allowed to alter the frequencies for the CPU's
FSB, and
lock AGP/PCI speeds.
There were also dividers under this menu for setting the memory
speed to DDR266, DDR333...etc. On minor
annoyance was that our CPU speed was not automatically
determined. We had to manually change the FSB speed to
133MHz. While this does not seem to be such a
bad thing, first time system builders might not catch
the speed selection and may just accept the
default configuration. The CPU VCore can be
adjusted in .25V increments, but in tops off at 1.6V,
which doesn't offer much of an improvement over the
default 1.5V.
|
