|
  
Click to enlarge
An aluminum heatsink/fan actively cools the Northbridge. Removing the heatsink exposes the Northbridge. There's only a TIM between the two, so it'd be a good idea to use some thermal paste in its place.
The Intel 845PE chipset is a flipchip design, and is the traffic cop for the higher level I/O requests, including support for DDR333. The I/O Controller Hub (ICH4) remains unchanged from the i845E, and is responsible for things such as ATA, LAN, and AC97 sound. USB2.0 is also a feature, fully integrated into the ICH4, and negates the need for an add on controller that MSI used in the past. Despite the new features, ATA100 support is all that is offered with this chipset.
 
Click to enlarge
To address the lack of ATA133 support in the ICH4, the Max2 - BLR does include the Promise 20276 hard disk controller. Other than offering either RAID 0 or RAID 1 mode support, you can also configure it to run your hard drives independently. As with previous Promise controllers, expect 10-15 seconds added to your boot time. What is noteworthy is that with the Promise controller, and the Primary and Secondary IDE controllers, you have support for up to 8 IDE devices.
A departure from previous boards, the Realtek ALC650 sound chip isn't present. In its place is the C-Media 8738MX, which is a 6-channel PCI audio controller. It's comparible to most mid level soundcards, and can easily be used in place of a dedicated sound card. It does eat away at your CPU, but considering that the slowest 533FSB Pentium 4 is 2.26GHz, I really doubt it'll make a difference.
  
Click to enlarge
If you want to make use of the 6-Channel sound, you'll need to install the D-Bracket for it. The ICH4 supports up to 6 USB connections, and other than the four USB ports built-in, you have two additional adapters, giving you the 6 total. The USB D-Bracket also has a diagnostic LED display that can assist you if you have bootup problems.
The i845PE Max2 also includes FireWire support, thanks to VIA's VT6306 FireWire controller, giving you the option to use that high speed interface instead of USB. From what research I was able to find, external FireWire hard drives tend to be faster and more reliable than USB2.0. Because FireWire is also an industry standard for video cameras, so this is a nice addition for those of you who dabble in video editing.
Something that bothered me with the i845E Max2 was the lack of 3-Pin fan headers. The problem is present again with the i845PE Max 2. There are a total of 3 headers, and only two are usable since the northbridge fan uses one of them.
 
Click to enlarge
Six PCI slots are there for your expansion needs. Considering that things such as LAN, RAID and sound are included, there are a lot of possibilities as your PC grows. I should warn you that it may be tricky getting all the slots to behave, depending on what PCI cards you choose to install. The manual makes clear what IRQs share with which, so as long as your peripherals can share IRQs, you'll be fine.
The new rear panel differs slightly from the "traditional" ones, hence MSI's inclusion of an extra rear panel plate. The rear panel isn't legacy free, but it does include an extra two USB ports which will be useful for those of you with more than two devices.
 
Click to enlarge
Just above the extra USB connection on the rear panel is the RJ-45 network connection. What is interesting is that the NIC controller is the Intel 82540EM, which supports 10Mb/s, 100Mb/s and 1000Mb/s. Yes, you read that last number right... Gigabit Ethernet is supported, though it'll still be some time before you'll get that for home use.
Previous Page - The Board
Next Page - BIOS and Overclocking
|
MSI i845PE Max2-FIR: MSI kicks out their latest Pentium 4 board, and it packs a lot of the usual features, as well as some forward looking ones, such as Hyperthreading support, and Gigabit Ethernet.
