Hirdetés
A tale of MSI
If any of you have had an MSI mainboard in the past then the above mentioned "magic words" should sound very familiar. To kick off with D-Led, forget the sound and look at the light, as the leds will blink if there is a boot problem. Should the boot process be flawless, the leds will light up informing us that certain parts of the POST (Power-On Self Test) just finished normally. Nice feature. D-Bracket is a similar, but more elegant approach, as the leds are located on a slot-unit back panel, so if you have any spare slots (take AMR/CNR :)), you can just screw the D-Bracket in place and get to see the led signals at the back of the PC.
PC2PC is a lot more "practical" though. It will be incorporated in every newer MSI motherboard and its purpose is to be able to connect 2 MSI boards (2 PC's with MSI boards) through their USB ports to provide general file transfer/sharing, LAN emulation, etc. This move is a bit "MSI-discriminative" :), but I guess no other manufacturer supports a similar construct, so MSI had no choice. And anyway, looking at the company's current rate of growth, everyone will have MSI boards in the near future, all we need is some patience :). USB 1.1 supports up to 8.6MBps transfer rates and PC2PC runs with all major operating systems (with the exception of Linux - big minus for MSI there!). We wouldn't be very suprised :), if PC2PC eventually supported USB 2.0 as well, as the next-gen port is here knocking on our doors (and the newest mainboards) and is wowed to have a 40X transfer rate increase over its predecessor.
With Live BIOS we can update our BIOS fast and painless through the internet, although the stability of a Windows 9x system can eventually cause us some pain through big blue screens.. anyhow, the option of flashing the BIOS through DOS is still there, for the careful user. Fuzzy Logic promises no more than to manage the overclocking of our machine all by itself. It raises the FSB, tests everything, raises the FSB again, etc. If needed, it runs down the nearest Fry's shop and gets us a FOP38 cooler, doesn't forget to apply some thermal paste to the CPU core, in fact it might make us a watercooler, while we are updating our BIOS or doing our regular pizza orders and online shopping.. oh, this is not actually true, as these features will only be supported by Fuzzy Logic 4, but this is all NDA info anyway, so we will have to quit now.. :)
MSI is an "oldie" in the industry, it began its activities sometime in 1986 and although its private history is sort of hidden in the www.msi.com.tw page, it is still a good source for some forward-looking thoughts. It is known however, that the company bears the ISO-9001/2/4 quality assurrance and that 120 highly qualified engineers are designing the newer and newer motherboards so that the 99.6% "hit rate" of the produced boards can be maintained. This means that only 0.4% of the manufactured boards are faulty, which is really not much. On the other hand, if I base my calculations on the 980.000 boards sold in January, that means 3920 pieces, which is on twentieth of the complete output of SHUTTLE.. I guess doing it seriously in volume does make a difference..
It is an interesting thing that MSI is concentrating heavily on the European region. In 1998, MSI sold about one and a half times as much boards here than in the Far-Eastern markets and around double of what in the US. It's a general tendency that Taiwanese manufacturers are leaving the "continent" and setting up branch offices in other regions, we could already observe this with Iwill, so we needn't go very far for examples..
Of course, MSI is not only the manufacturer of mainboards, but graphics cards, bare bone systems, CD-ROMs and a whole lot more, but it is their motherboards that made them famous.
To remain so famous, one must not slow down. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we could witness FIVE new mainboard releases in the last 10 days from MSI! During these 10 days, they also cashed a "Symbol of Excellence Award" - the most respected prize in Taiwan, standing for the highest quality - for its K7T Pro2 board and an AMD Certificate. Shouldn't this be enough, the Starforce 822 video card with nVidia's GeForce3 chip (call it GPU, if you must :)) was also announced.
This article promised to be a K7T Turbo-R review, not an MSI introductory, so we will stop praising MSI now and get back to the subject, the K7T Turbo-R, as he ought to be standing in the spotlights.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
