New Socket 7 Motherboards - July 1997

MSI 5147

The MSI-5147 is a very interesting as well as surprising board. It is using the SiS 5571 chipset which is well known by lots of 6x86 users, since it's used on the M-Tech R534. However the MSI 5147 certainly makes less problems than the R534 and it comes in ATX form factor. The performance of this board is better than the performance of the R534 and altogether quite surprising, especially compared to Intel's TX chipset boards. The MSi 5147 also supports 'linear burst' so you might go for this one in case you are a 6x86 or 6x86MX fan. In case you should want to use SDRAM on this board take these two important advices: Get the latest BIOS first or let the store flash it on the board before you buy it. The BIOS mine came with wouldn't boot at all with SDRAM, not even from floppy. That would leave you quite stupid in case you haven't got any EDO or FPM RAM to at least flash the new BIOS. Secondly you'll have to set the SDRAM timing to x-2-2-2 instead of X-1-1-1 as you would think and leave 'Enhanced Memory Write' disabled, because it'll crash otherwise.

This board was again costing me several hours and a lot of nerves. THe 75 MHz bus clock, required by a 6x86MX PR233 CPU is too much of a demand for this board. Please forget about using this board in case you want higher bus speeds than 66 MHz. What a huge disappointment! No 83 MHz bus clock support, of course not!

Use these settings with SDRAM and 66 MHz bus speed:

In the front you can see the SiS5571 chipset with its typical heatsink, the upper right corner shows you the switching voltage regulator of the MSI-5147.