Our lab engineers made a very interesting discovery about the MSI Springdale board: during the boot process and when running Windows, the board behaved perfectly normally - as long as the processor was not working at full capacity. When we ran well-known utilities such as WCPUID, Intel Frequency Display, CPUZ and SiSoft Sandra 2003, they always measured the core frequency at 3014 MHz with a corresponding FSB speed of 200.96 MHz.

The well-known utility shows the processor speed - but not every time.

Normally reliable - but not when speeds are increased dynamically.

Even Intel's proprietary utility for determining the correct CPU speed can be misled under special circumstances.

For your information: we used the new 3.0 GHz P4 for FSB 800 and dual DDR 400 in our test. The odd situation only occurred when an application was started and when CPU usage was pushed close to 100 percent. We became suspicious when we obtained very high results in benchmark tests such as 3D Mark 2001/ 2003 (which show the CPU core frequency correctly), Main Concept MPEG-2 encoding and 3D Studio Max 5.1.

Unusually high: the 3D Mark 2001 results for the MSI 865 Neo 2.