|
As you
can imagine mechanically, setup with this board was
a snap. Let's look at the electrical side of
things and see what's under the hood.
|
CPU
Setup ?
|
Memory
Timings
|
|
Advanced
Setup
|
Health
Monitoring
| Alright
then, we have to come out and tell it like it is in
this section. If you are interested in running
a P4 board that allows you to tweak your system for
optimal performance, the MS-850Pro with its current
BIOS revision, is not a board you would want.
Unless MSI updates the BIOS on the 850Pro with
additional features and enhancements, this board
will remain quite mundane. Without doubt, a
BIOS revision could unlock the potential within the
850Pro but that is up to MSI deliver.
|
| Overclocking |
| or
lack there of |
|
This
section is going to be short and sweet. There
is currently no way to overclock a stock retail P4
CPU with this board. There is only the ability
to change the multiplier of the processor, which is
useful in the event that you are fortunate enough to
own an Engineering Release P4 direct from
Intel. In other words, its useless due to the
fact that all Intel CPUs are multiplier locked...
but you knew that.
So, we
might as well get to our standard performance
numbers.
|
| H.H.
Test System |
| Straight
up |
|
-
MSI MS-850Pro Motherboard with
Pentium 4 Processor @ 1.5GHz.
-
256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM,
-
IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive - Supplied
by Outside Loop!
-
nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card,
-
56K PCI Modem
-
Sound Blaster Live Sound Card,
-
Hitachi DVD ROM Drive,
-
WindowsME
-
Direct X 8.0 and nVidia reference drivers version
7.17
-
Intel chipset drivers version 2.60a
|
| Benchmarks
With MSI's MS-850Pro |
| In
with the pack |
|
As with
all of our motherboard reviews here at HH, we'll
start off the testing with a few runs of SiSoft's
Sandra, just to get a baseline reading.
|
CPU
Test 1.5GHz.
Multimedia
Test 1.5GHz.
|
|
Sandra
Memory 1.5GHz.
|
Sandra
Drive Benchmark
| | Fairly
standard issue scores were reported here. The
MS-850Pro keeps pace with the P4 reference system in
these tests. However, note the fact that
Sandra reports a 1.48GHz. clock speed in the CPU
test. This suggests a little less aggressive
clock timing generation on the board and even though
it is set to 1.5GHz., the PLL (phase lock loop)
Clock is driving something a little less than
that standard clock speed.
Let's
move out to more strenuous testing...
Business,
Content Creation, Q3 and the Heat Meter
| 
