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)

Physical Layout Of The Board:

It's amazing to me that they were able to cram on so many features, yet still keep this board the regular ATX size. Glancing over the board, there is the 20pin ATX connector right below the CPU socket, the 4pin 12v connector is right above the CPU socket. There is another curious 4pin power connector at the bottom of the board near the IDE ports, this is to help power all the devices onboard! The two channel RAID ports are controlled via a Promise controller. You get the usual 4x AGP slot, 6 PCI slots, and a CNR slot.

The northbridge chip is actively cooled, which is a plus IMO, on some boards that use passive cooling I have noticed that it can get quite hot (but have yet to experience any instability caused from it), however I like to keep things nice and cool whenever possible.

The 20pin ATX connector is VERY close to the edge of the heatsink bracket. Things start to get quite crammed once you mount the heatsink and get the power plugged in. Also here's a close-up of the extra 4-pin power connector.

Looking at the back of the board it is a pretty standard layout, one port looks like it is missing, but that is because boards with onboard video use that space for the VGA port. Some of the audio ports are mounted on the board, and the rest are on a bracket. The Ethernet port is an Intel GIGABIT chip (which is great for people like me who do have a current 100/1000 network), even if you only have a 100Mb network today, it is one less thing that you will have to upgrade in the future. I'm starting to see more and more small 10/100 switches with one or two gigabit ports available on them for around $100, so people who do a lot of file sharing might consider the upgrade.

Included is the usual collection of manuals, drivers, case badge, HD/FD cables, and atx backplate (I forgot to include it in the picture). There are also three brackets included. One is for Audio (top bracket), another is for Firewire, which includes two standard and one mini plug (middle bracket), and the last is for USB/Bluetooth (bottom bracket). This board doesn't actually have Bluetooth, rather it is "Bluetooth ready", meaning you can buy some other MSI adapter thingy to plug in and go. I guess it would be a slightly cheaper alternative to buying a USB Bluetooth dongle, but since I don't own and have never used anything Bluetooth related I really can't speak much about the subject. Also there are the Diagnostic LEDs which can help diagnose problems if you can't get your system to boot up.

One thing to note is that MSI has a LiveUpdate program, which you can either install from the CD or download from their website. It is kind of a "windows update" program, but for your motherboard. You can automatically download & update your BIOS (from within windows!), drivers, and also utilities with the LiveUpdate program. It's a pretty nifty program that supports most MSI boards.

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