Heir To The BX: 18 Pentium III Motherboards Using The 815 Chipset

MSI 815E Pro / MS-6337 Pro, Continued

The package includes a manual (I only got a preliminary, yet it’s complete and easy to understand) and a driver CD. Several different sound drivers are on this disc ; MSI probably uses different codec and PCI chips. I suppose that beginners could easily be puzzled when trying to chose the right one. There’s bad news from the SDRAM test : The board failed with almost 50% of the tested memory. The DIMMs from Viking and Kingston both did not work ; most likely due to their 128 Mbit single sided design. The memory from PCI and my HSDRAM module didn’t want to run either. Just the RAM from Corsair, Crucial, Memory Solution (Germany), Mushkin and Wichmann Workx (Germany) worked properly.

MSI included an option to change the processor core voltage and chose the FSB speed freely in 1 MHz increments, making this board an excellent overclocking platform. I tried the system at 166 MHz and had two crashes, most likely because the GMCH chip became too hot. A little heat sink could fix this.

If you use conventional but high-end memory (128 MB double sided, 64x8 chips), the only problem you could face is that the lock of some CPU coolers could interfere with the DIMM in slot #1 :

Luckily I don’t have more to criticize, so let’s get back to the benefits : High performance, Solano-like excellent stability, overclocking features and lots of hardware resources. If you have an old ISA card you may also go for the version with one ISA slot.