3D Mark 2001SE

3D Mark is one of those benchmark apps that will eat up as much processing power as it can. Benchmarks were run at default 1024x768, as I felt 640x480 is getting to be fairly pointless. The 845PE adds a little over 100 3D Marks.

Quake 3 Arena

It's getting old, I know, but Quake 3 is still a decent benchmark for almost anything. For motherboards and CPUs, we run at the lowest settings and fire away. There is a slight improvement of a little over 2FPS, but an improvement nevertheless.

Jedi Knight 2

Jedi Knight is still a Quake 3 engine game, but heavily modified. It's extemely taxing, but like Quake 3, the 845PE scores another narrow victory.

Final Words

The MSI 845PE Max2 packs a lot of features, some old, some new, in the rather crowded Pentium 4 motherboard arena. The addition of FireWire is a feature that many home, mainly multimedia users, may find very useful. Gigabit Ethernet, though hardly mainstream, should provide plenty of bandwidth if you haul this rig to a giga-LAN party.

Other than that, enthusiasts will like the overclockability, stability, and generally good speed. The red PCB returns, making the board very attractive for case window equipped cases, though it would have been nice if the mosfet heatsinks from the 845E made it to this model.

This board is faster than the previous 845 DDR (845E) board MSI released, and it appears that the added memory bandwidth may have something to do with that. With support for Hyperthreading, you'll be all set for your future Pentium 4s to go full flight.

Results from testing the onboard LAN and sound CPU usage was a little better this time. Both will hit your CPU while in use, but nothing too terrible. We lost about 5 FPS in Quake 3 when using the onboard sound (where the baseline was with a Soundblaster Audigy), and about 6 FPS while downloading a map pack during benchmarking. What is remarkable about the NIC results, is that the baseline for the networking was a 3Com PCI adapter, and we lost about 10FPS while doing the same chore. In anycase, this is hardly a problem if you're averaging 190+ FPS.

Our complaints are minor. As usual, video cards may interfere with ram installation or removal if the video card is in place. This is not as bad as I've seen on some Asus boards, but as we noted with the Ti4600, the problem exists here. Placement of the power headers also could have been a little better. Serial ATA would have been a nice touch as well.

That being said, we were very impressed with the performance the motherboard. I raved about the 845E Max2, and this board improves upon everything in terms of performance, and features. MSI could have replaced the northbridge and called it quits, but they didn't. The board was also extremely stable during testing, and the 845PE chipset, along with the Gigabit LAN, seems to have a bright future. Well, for the next 6 months anyways...

MSI:

Pros: Good performance, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, Hyperthreading support, extra USB 2.0 ports, solid construction, stable, good software bundle.

Cons: Long boot times with RAID enabled.

Bottom Line: As with most recent boards, feature-wise, MSI does not skimp here. Memory speeds are much improved, and the board has almost every feature one could need (though missing Serial ATA), and in the case of Hyperthreading, will need, to make this a future-proof choice.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss it in our forums.

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