Board Revision: 1
BIOS Version: 1.1 (July 25, 2000)

The motherboards from QDI and MSI both have a deep greep PCB. MSI's Solano 2 board comes with four DIMM sockets, which you usually cannot make full use of. As I already mentioned above, Solano only supports four memory rows. That restricts the memory setup to max. two double sided DIMMs or one double and two single sided. You can only equip all four sockets if you use single sided DIMMs only.

6 PCI slots, one CNR and two UltraATA/100 channels should be enough for most users. Three fan headers are provided in order to keep your system cool. The sound system is compatible to the AC97 standard and uses a Sigmatel codec chip. Three inputs are available to attach CD-ROM, video card, TV card or other multimedia hardware.

This motherboard is also available with 5 PCI and 1 ISA slot and/or with a PCI sound chip. Two additional USB ports are available with this motherboard; but you will have to purchase the adapter cable yourself. There is not much to complain about the design, just the lower DIMM locks interfere with the AGP card - most competitors have the same weakness.

Most MSI motherboards come with a debug feature called D-LED. Four LEDs on the motherboard are showing you the system state during start up. If the system doesn't want to start, you can find out the reason with the help of D-LED. A little speaker on the motherboard replaces the case speaker.