MSI 850 Pro2 - extreme P4 overclocking!

Hirdetés

The first 4 layer board

Being first is a cool thing and recently MSI is quite used to the situation. From an engineer's perspective, designing a 4 layer P4 board in not an easy task and thus MSI has every right to be proud. From the customers perspective, however, layers don't matter at all. Price does and features, as well. "Luckily", the two things are directly connected, as 4 layer boards should be cheaper than their 6 layer cousins as they are easier to produce (not to design). We asked MSI about this and they did in fact reply that the 850 Pro2 board should be 5 USD cheaper than the 850 Pro, even at introduction. While 5 bucks don't sound much, keep in mind, that the 850 Pro2 is a freshly released board and is surely carrying a price premium because of this. The 850 Pro was one of the cheapest P4 boards anyway, so a full-featured and new mainboard coming at the lowest price is nothing to be ashamed of. In addition, the ASUS P4T, the only other board with the same excellent features is on the most expensive side. If stability and speed is right, MSI for now has an absolute winner, no question about that.

We have pretty much discussed all that's in the table above, but it's a nice thing to have things summed up. We will not be touching MSI's proprieraty features, like PC2PC USB pseudo-networking and D-Led technology, as they have thoroughly been discussed everywhere, even in our own review of the MSI K7T Turbo-R. The 850 Pro2 comes in a (nice) standard MSI box, with all required cables, heatsink retension clips, PC2PC USB cables, drivers and manuals inside. The manual is pretty decent, although under the BIOS Settings part we still see options like "this sets the RDRAM Turbo option. Options are: enabled, disabled". Probably anyone can figure that out by himself :), a brief and real description would have been nice... (you can find similar "descriptions" in any manual, not only MSI's... in fact, this option isn't even a real one in this case, we just wanted to display an example that there is still place for manual improvements for any mainboard, any company).

Click the box!

The board is equipped with a few 1500uF and 2200uF capacitors. At first, they didn't seem "enough", but the whole mystical belief around capacitor number and size directly correlating with stability and overclocking performance is a bit overexaggarated. Ask any engineer, it is a bit more complicated than that :). Nevertheless, MSI's offering turned out to be an extremely stable one, matching the ASUS P4T exactly with the highest achievable FSB speed.

Stability factors

Overclocking fans will be happy to see that the North Bridge (oops, better said GMCH) is equipped with active cooling. The i850 GMCH does tend to run hot, but we were more statisfied with the huge passive heatsink we saw on almost all other P4 boards, as it does its job perfectly, but is much more quiet. For a short testing period though, the active solution is better, as the GMCH isn't to overheat, even with "insane" FSBs, for sure. The South Bridge (ICH) is the standard UDMA/100 capable ICH2, with 2 IDE channels supporting up to 4 IDE devices.

Click the fan!

The 850 Pro2 stops the tradition of equipping high-end mainboards with AGP Pro slots, or at least, does not bear one. On the other hand, the AGP 4X slot is enforced by the AGP retension mechanism we first saw on Gigabyte boards. It is a nice thing as it makes sure the AGP card is firmly seated and doesn't move once it is installed.

Rev:1, still works fine

A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!