MSI MS850Pro


MSI MS850Pro - Page 1

MSI  850Pro
MSI's P4 Board Driven By the i850

By Dave Altavilla
2/12/01
 

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

 

Tags:  MSI, MS, pro, S850

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