MSI 845PE Max2 Motherboard

Company: MSI
Product: 845PE Max2 MB
Street Price: ~$150 USD
Date Reviewed: January 28, 2003
Reviewed By: Jason R.
Rating: (8.5/10)

Introduction:

MSI (Micro Star International) is no stranger to the overclocking community, with their boards feature rich in tweaking options. One of their latest boards, the 845PE Max2 is fully loaded with extra options onboard, with no sacrifice to overclocking. Some quick highlights of this board are: HyperThreading support, two channel RAID, USB 2.0, Firewire, CMedia 6 Channel Audio, Gigabit Ethernet, and bluetooth support. The BIOS has tons of features too, FSB up to 233MHz, voltage adjustments for the CPU, Memory, and AGP!

Specifications:

CPU
 • Supports Socket 478 for Intel® Pentium 4 processor
 • Supports up 3.06G/533MHz and higher speed

Chipset
 • Intel® 845PE chipset
  - FSB 533 MHz.
  - Supports DDR 266/333 DDR technology.
  - 1.5 V AGP 4X and PCI advanced high performance memory controller.
• Intel® ICH4 chipset (421 BGA)
  - Integrated Direct Sound AC97 audio.
  - Dual channel Ultra DMA 66/100 master mode IDE controller.
  - ACPI & PC2001 compliant enhanced power management.
  - Integrated USB 2.0 controller.

FSB
 • Support 100/133MHz FSB
 • Support 400/533MHz Intel NetBurst micro-architecture bus.

Main Memory
 • Supports four memory banks using three 184-pin DDR DIMMs.
 • Supports up to 2GB PC2700/PC2100 DDR SDRAMs.
 • Supports 2.5v DDR SDRAM.

Slots
 • One AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot.
  - Supports AGP 1.5 4x.
 • Six 32-bit Master PCI Bus slots.
 • One CNR (Communication Network Riser) slot.

On-Board IDE
 • Dual IDE controllers integrated in Promise 20275/20276.
 • PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA66/100/133 operation modes.

Serial ATA Interface
 • Promise 20376 controllers 2 Serial ATA ports in 150 MB/s operation mode and 1 Ultra DMA port.

Bluetooth
 • 1 Bluetooth connector for wireless connection.

On-Board Peripherals
 • 1 floppy port supports 2 FDDs with 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M and 2.88Mbytes
 • 1 serial port (COM A)
 • 1 parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode.
 • 1 IrDA connector for with Intel® & MSI pin-definition
 • 1 Line-in/Line-out/MIC port
 • C-Media 8738 6 channel audio SPDIF (Optional)
 • 6 USB 2.0 ports (Rear * 4/ Front * 2)
 • 1 RJ-45 LAN jack (optional)
 • 1394 port controlled by VT6306 (Optional)

Audio
• C-Media 8738MX 6-channel audio.

Lan (Optional)
 • Intel® 82540EM/82551/82562ET Dual layout.
  - Integrated Fast Ethernet MAC and PHY in one chip.
  - Supports 10Mb/s, 100Mb/s and 1000Mb/s.
  - Compliance with PCI 2.2.
  - Supports ACPI Power Management.

BIOS
 • The mainboard BIOS provides "Plug & Play" BIOS which detects the peripheral devices and expansion cards of the board automatically.
 • The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface (DMI) function which records your mainboard specifications.
 • Supports Multi-Language

Dimension
 • 30.5 cm(L) x 24.5 cm(W) ATX Form Factor

Mounting
 • 9 mounting holes

Accessories:
 • D-Bracket™2
 • S-Bracket
 • MSI™ 1394 Cable

*Specifications Courtesy of MSI.

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