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)

Overclocking:

I think I talked about most of the board's overclocking features in the BIOS section, it has a good voltage selection, and FSB / Memory tweaking. Like I mentioned before, to overcome the 150FSB limitation with your memory divisors dropping to 1:1, you can use MSI's Fuzzy Logic program. It is windows based, which is nice, letting you increase / decrease your FSB & Voltages from within windows with no need to reboot. It doesn't let you choose the highest voltages that you can choose in the BIOS, but it does let you run the FSB up as high as you can stable. You can actually only dial-in 180FSB, to go higher you have click the auto button and let it run its stability test as it increases the FSB by 1MHz at a time. Needless to say this could be a serious pain if you run you CPU above 180FSB, because when you reboot it doesn't save the settings to automatically re-apply them. There is a save button, but for some reason it doesn't work properly at high FSB speeds. Overall the fuzzy logic program is very easy to use, and is great for the novice overclocker. By simply clicking the "auto" button you can let it keep running its test till the system locks up, then when it reboots you can load the saved OC info. I should note that using the auto feature doesn't adjust any voltages, you have to do that before you let it run its tests if you want to achieve a higher OC.

For the tests I ran the CPU (a 2.4B C1 stepping) at stock speed (2.4GHz), with the memory at 333MHz. Then I OCed the system to 175FSB using the fuzzy logic program (so that I could keep the memory multi), which ran the CPU at a nice 3.15GHz and the memory at 438MHz. Why 175FSB? It seemed like a nice round number, and also was close to running the memory at PC3500 speeds. I have gotten the CPU up to 190FSB on this board, which is 3.42GHz, and the memory at 475MHz!!! Below are the two Sandra screenshots with the general info that the CPU was run at during the tests.

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