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)

BIOS Features:

We all know the BIOS is what can really make or break a board in performance. MSI leaves no stone unturned when it comes to tweaking options. The main BIOS page is just your standard AMI BIOS layout. The Standard CMOS Features contain the usual date / HD / FD settings, nothing special there.. hehe..

Under the Advanced BIOS features things start to get a little better, one biggie for some people is the option to enable / disable HyperThreading, however this option only works for the 3.06 HT chips. Setting it to enable had no effect on the 2.4B that I used. :(  The advanced chipset features main page is kinda blah, just setting the AGP Aperture size, but if you click on the DRAM timings you get a plethora of choice to tweak.

The DRAM Timings page is slightly different that others that I have used. There are the usual settings for CAS/RAS/Precharge stuff, but instead of just having the regular memory divisor listing like 3:4,4:5,4:6, etc.. MSI has chosen to simply list either 200MHz, 266MHz, 333MHz, and Auto. If you consider that running at stock speed, you can do the math to get the actual divisors that each one of these speeds represents. Setting the 333MHz is really using a 4:5 FSB:MEM ratio, which is good if you are planning on hitting really high FSB's. With more boards coming out with the options to choose either 3:4 or 4:5, it would be nice if MSI was able to add these features in perhaps in a future BIOS revision. One SERIOUS downfall is that when you run above 150FSB, the memory will fallback to 1:1, which can seriously cripple your memory performance. An easy work-around for this is to simply set your BIOS to 150FSB (or lower), then use MSI's FuzzyLogic program to overclock, then you will be able to run over 150FSB and keep the better memory divisor. Again, another BIOS tweak that I hope MSI fixes in future revisions.

I'm not going to talk about the Power Management Features or PNP/PCI Configuration menus, they are pretty much standardized on all boards.

The Integrated Peripherals gives you the options to enable / disable the usual IDE / RAID / Audio / Serial / Parrallel ports. If you aren't running anything on the RAID ports, disabling them will let your computer boot faster since it doesn't sit there trying to scan those ports each time.

Lastly comes the PC Health Status & Frequency / Voltage Control menus. If you had an engineering sample then I would assume that the CPU Ration Selection would list a bunch of divisors for you to choose, but for all practical purposes this will simply say "Locked" for everyone. The FSB can be adjusted in 1MHz increments all the way up to 233MHz! I like to lock my AGP/PCI Clock at the standard 66/33MHz, but you can lock them at other speeds above or below this number should you feel the need.

Adjusting voltages has got to be the best part of this board. You can adjust the CPU VCore from 1.525v-1.825v, DDR from 2.5v-2.8v, AGP from 1.5v-1.8v! This is the first board I've seen recently that lets you adjust the AGP voltage, however I'm not really sure how useful this feature is if your AGP bus isn't overclocked. My board did under-volt by about 0.025-0.05v under load, depending on the speed & voltage selected. Just running everything stock, the voltage was reported as 1.5v (even though it was set at 1.525v), once I got over about 3.2GHz is when it would under-volt the most.

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