BIOS

    What does the BIOS look like, is it any different from most motherboard BIOS's?  Lets look at a few of the screens that are specific to this motherboard, and there are quite a few that a specific to the motherboard.

    Lets look at two different sections, first the Standard CMOS settings as well as the temperature monitor menu.  As we look at what should be a standard menu, we see something that is slightly different.  Because this motherboard uses the ICH5R instead of the ICH5 we have four extra IDE spots, though we only have a total of two extra IDE ports, of the SATA variety.  Apart from that the menu offers the standard features available to all motherboards.  Next is the temperature monitoring menu, which offers the standard look at two temperatures, the standard voltages, and two fan speeds.  Nothing extremely interesting, as there is no specific temperature that you can have set here for a warning.

    Next lets look at the integrated peripherals section of the BIOS.  Here you can choose to enable the USB controller, though why you wouldn't is beyond me.  Also available is the option to enable the CSA Gigabit network card, which can be either auto or disabled.  Then you have the choice for the Promise onboard IDE, which gives you the options seen in the left most screen, of SATA or RAID, which also works with SATA drives.  Lastly is an option for enabling the onboard audio.  There is an option of the onboard IDE configuration which takes you to the screen on the right.  This allows many options in enabling the ICH5R's IDE drive configuration, what you see there is the configuration I used, with the last option being the only one that changed at any point. 

    Now we will look at the spot where most of the tweaker/overclockers time will be spent, in the Frequency/Voltage control.  With BIOS revisions after 1.2, you get the option for "Dynamic Overclocking" with some very interesting names for the varying levels, in a miltary theme from Private to General (just make sure that the General setting doesn't give you a protection fault).  Next is the Performance mode, which basically controls the memory settings, though why the actual memory settings aren't here is odd, but apart from that it gives you some standard options: Slow, fast, turbo, and Ultra-turbo.  The Ultra-Turbo option gives you the fastest settings that there are, of 2-2-2-5.  Next is the FSB control, which allows you raise the FSB to either 355MHz or 500MHz, though how it is possible to reach these FSB speeds is frightening to me.  However if you found a CPU that would do that, then this board has the options you are looking for.  

    Lastly is the voltages, the CPU can go up to 2.3v which is scary for all but the most 'hardcore' overclockers.  The DDR voltage can go up to 3.3v which is slightly higher than I've taken my RAM (3v) but gives that extra headroom if you need it.  The AGP voltage goes up to 2.2v though there is an option to lock the AGP/PCI buses so that this isn't as necessarily needed as much, unless you want to overclock the AGP bus speed to get those extra few fps out of your card.  A nice feature that MSI has included for the voltage settings is a color coded markers which tell you when you are reaching the danger zone for the piece that you are applying the voltage to.  I must say that at least in theory MSI has provided some of the best overclocking options for a user to play with out of the motherboards I've tested so far.

RAID Setup and Overclocking

    MSI has provided the ability to have up to three different RAID array's on this motherboard.  The onboard ICH5R provides one SATA RAID 0 array, and the Promise controller offers one RAID 0 or 1 array for both the PATA drives and the SATA drives, thus allowing up to three arrays, assuming you have the drives needed.  Lets look at both setup screens, first looking at the onboard Intel RAID controller.

    The start up screen for the Intel RAID is fairly plain, telling you what arrays you have defined and what you haven't defined.  It also shows that you need to press ctrl and I to enter the menu for the configuration of the array.  A note is that this menu does move slightly quickly, so I would be ready to press the key's pretty quickly if you want to enter the menu.  The configuration menu allows you to create, delete or reset the array, which is pretty standard for any RAID menu.  You have the options for changing the strip size from 16KB to 256KB with 64KB being the default setting and the one I used for testing.

    The Promise start screen shows less information than the Intel screen does, providing only the fact that there is a RAID array present and its size as well as how to enter the Fastbuild menu (ctrl and F).  Once inside the menu you are greeted with the basic options of create, delete and resetting the array, however you also get the option to automatically setup the drives and view the drive assignments.  The Intel program shows the information about the drives automatically so this is an extra step that Promise has you do, but it gives you the information about the drives and what array they are currently in.  The RAID array gives you the same options for strip size as the Intel one has, and again we used 64KB for out testing.  Overall the Intel program for its integrated RAID array is simpler and more informative up front, while the Promise program offers a couple more options to use.  

    All the settings are nice to play with but how does the system overclock with a PIV 2.4c processor?  Can we reach the 'magical' 1GHz FSB?  Let's see the results.  Note that the highest overclock came with the Vantec AreoFlow PIV heatsink. 

    This was the highest overclock we were able to reach with the heatsink that we mentioned above.  At this speed and voltage the CPU temperature was well in excess of 60ºC, with the case running at about 34ºC and the northbridge running at 60ºC.  So it may have been that heat was an issue at this point.  Overall a decent overclock, and pretty well in line with most motherboards.  So how well does this board work performance wise?  Lets look at the system we used.

Benchmark Setup

    Both CPU's were used for testing, with the 2.4b being the only one that worked on both motherboards.  We have also taken some comparison results for Pi Fast from Hubert's Abit IS7 Max II Advance review, as well as his latest MSI Mega 651 PC review.  The memory was run at its SPD settings, and even so was running at 2.5-4-4-8 even at 133MHz on the 865PE motherboard.  The 845PE had no trouble with the RAM and happily ran it at 2-2-2-5 at 133MHz.  

   All tests were run at least three times, with the highest of the two scores being used.  If the scores were not within a 1% range the test was redone until that occurred.  The Unreal Tournament test used the HardOCP test software's CPU test and was run at 640*480.  The Jedi Knight tests were run at 1024*768 with high quality settings, as test was not GPU limited at this resolution.  Pi Fast was rung using 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory, just as we at VL have done previously.

    For DUMeter, the host machine was the 865PE, with the CSA Gigabit network card running at a maximum of 1Gbps, using CAT5E crossover cable to connect to the other computers.  The files used for both the Network transfer tests and the real life hard drive tests totaled just over 9GB and had within the 15000 files various file sizes, from 1KB to over 1GB in size.  Our real life hard drive test consisted of copying the files from a SATA RAID0 array to the other hard drives.  The H2benchw software was run on each hard drive using the following command line from DOS, C:\h2benchw.exe -english -! (Hard drive number) -a -w filename, which provided a full read and write test of the hard drives.

    Both our DivX 5.03 and our TMPGEnc tests used the same video file, a HuffYUV encoding of 8555 frames of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (NTSC).  With the TMPGEnc tests the following settings were used, and the video was encoded with the audio as well.  With our DivX 5.03 tests the same video was encoded minus the audio at 1500kbps with the only other change being made to the default settings was that every 30 frames there was a keyframe, not 300.  Lastly Truespace was run using the same process mentioned in my previous article using the following settings, the image was then rendered to a 1600*1200 tga file.

Synthetic / 3D Rendering

    Synthetic benchmarks don't necessarily mean much to most people, but can provide a direct look at the specific areas of the system.  So we will take a quick look at Pi Fast, which, as the name suggests calculates Pi to as many digits as you want.  In our case we will calculate Pi to 10000000 places.  Lets see how the 865PE compares to the MSI 845PE, Abit IC7, and the Abit IS7.

    As we can see, the moving straight to the 865PE offers an 8% improvement with all other settings equal.  When moving to dual channel mode, we see a 14% improvement over the older 845PE chipset.  Compared to the Abit motherboards, the MSI 865PE does well with only a 1% difference with a 2.4b CPU.  Once we get to the 2.4C there is more of a difference, 3% compared to the IS7, and 4.5% difference compared to the IC7.  We can see in this first test that the 865PE does indeed have a fair amount of improvement compared to the older 845PE, which makes it faster in this test at least, how about other tests?

    Truespace is considered the beginners 3D animation program, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't create high quality images.  The following image was rendered at 1600*1200.  How did the 865PE perform in this test.

    As we can see with the results, there is really no real difference between the two different chipsets.  Even dual channel memory doesn't show much of a difference, only less than 0.5%.  When we increase the FSB to 200MHz we see a actual 6% increase in performance in single channel and a 9.5% increase with dual channel memory.  It is only with the 200MHz FSB that there is a improvement with dual channel memory, which could be explained as the memory at 133FSB is running at 178MHz.  Lets see how some games perform, specifically UT2003 and Jedi Knight II.

3D Games

    First lets look at Jedi Knight II, which is based off of the Quake III engine, which happens to be a very memory intensive program, and thus should love the extra bandwidth of the 865PE chipset.  Lets see how the MSI 865PE Neo2 does at 1024*768.

    What do these results show?  From the 845PE, which provides 109fps to the 865PE with the 2.4b processor, there is a 3.5-5% increase in frame rate.  Compared to the 2.4C on the 865PE with dual channel memory the 845PE motherboard is about 15% slower.  Here like with Pi Fast there is a difference between motherboards, as well as with memory bandwidth.  The difference can be as much as 4% with the higher bandwidth of the 2.4c processor.  Does this work the same with UT2003?

    Unreal Tournament 2003 is one of the most graphically intense games that is currently out.  As such it is a very demanding on both the video card and the CPU.  How does this new motherboard perform in this test?

    Here with UT2003 we see a progressive increase in frame rate.  The move to the 865PE yields a 3% improvement in this test, though dual channel memory adds another 2% of improvement in frame rate.  Moving to the higher FSB 2.4C processor yields a 7.5-8.5% improvement in frame rate compared to the comparison 2.4b processors.  So games seem to offer a improvement with the newer chipset even without changing the memory bandwidth to be twice as much.  How does video do with this new motherboard?

Video Rendering

    DivX is fast becoming a standard for video, and the quality level can be very good for the size.  This has allowed people to legally back up their DVD's to a smaller format.  So how does the 865PE perform in encoding video in VirtualDub 1.4.10, with DivX 5.03.

    DivX like most of the other programs that we have tested so far shows an improvement from the 865PE chipset.  This time the initial improvement is about 5% which means you get an extra fps, for your encoding of movies that could mean saving that essential time to encode your video.  Overall the improvement turns out to be 16%, going from the 845PE with a 2.4b processor to a 2.4C using dual channel memory on the 865PE chipset.  Does MPEG-2 encoding also show a similar improvement?  Lets find out.

    TMPGEnc is one of the least expensive MPEG-2, but doesn't sacrifice quality at all.  In fact it is one of the best MPEG-2 encoders I have used.  So how does this program perform with both the 845PE chipset and the newer 865PE Neo 2.

    Here we see a large boost going from the 845PE based chipset to the 865PE chipset, in the order of 19%.  After that there is little improvement to be had by moving to dual channel memory, 1% or less, which is within the error range of the test.  Moving from a 133MHz FSB CPU to a 200MHz one offers a 6% improvement, which is nice to see.  Overall a 27% improvement compared to the older 845PE chipset is very nice to see.  Now we've seen the performance of the chipset in relation to the CPU, however how does the other portions of the motherboard work, such as the network card and the IDE ports.

Network/Hard Drive Performance

    Most people today use a network card in one way or another, either to connect to high speed internet connections, or to connect in a business environment.  This chipset offers the fastest path to the CPU, as instead of using the PCI bus it uses its own dedicated bus, which runs at twice the PCI buses speed.  So using this chipset as the base system lets see how the other cards performs.

    The network speed seems to be pretty good for most of the systems, except for the Intel gigabit LAN which may have been a problem with the hard drive on that system.  But if we compare the results here to that of our Leadtek review, the cards do much better, with the DLink card showing a 55% improvement in uploading the files.  How about hard drive controller, how does the IDE and SATA fair in our testing.

    The ICH5R offers, not only standard IDE connectors but two SATA connectors as well.  The included Promise controller also adds an extra IDE connector and two more SATA connectors.  But how do these connectors work?  Lets see some real life results, as well as some synthetic hard drive tests.

Maxtor 34098H4 - Read Speed	Seagate ST340016A - Read Speed	Maxtor 6L040J2 - Read Speed
Maxtor 6E040L0 - Read Speed	Maxtor 6Y080L0 - Read Speed	Maxtor 6L040J2 & 6E040L0 RAID 0 - Read Speed
Maxtor 6Y080L0 RAID 0 - Read Speed	Maxtor 6L040J2 - Write Speed	Maxtor 6E040L0 - Write Speed
Maxtor 6Y080L0 - Write Speed	Maxtor 6L040J2 & 6E040L0 RAID 0 - Write Speed	Maxtor 6Y080L0 RAID 0 - Write Speed

    Here we see the performance of the hard drives in a direct copy from a RAID 0 Maxtor SATA array.  The standard ATA hard drives perform decently, and for video capturing they should do okay, with only a couple of drops with uncompressed 720*480 video.  However the SATA hard drive performs very well over 13MB/s faster than the nearest non RAID drives.  The RAID array is only slightly faster than the single SATA hard drive.  In the synthetic tests we see that the SATA RAID performance is very good, in fact double that of the single drive.  Overall the performance of SATA on this system is very good, and it seems that the current implementation of SATA is going to be work out well.

Conclusion

    So after looking at this motherboard, what can we conclude about its performance?  How about its layout and included extra's?

    First lets look at the layout of the motherboard.  The layout around the CPU is rather clear of any obstruction, with the heatsink of the North bridge being the only obstruction that is nearby.  The four DIMM slots are logically placed so that you don't mistake which ones give you the option for dual channel memory.  The position of the power connector is in its best place in my opinion, and the placement of the hard drives is good, with the connectors being placed so that you can connect hard drives from the upper part of the drive bays and also at the bottom, which are dominated by the SATA connectors.  Otherwise the layout is pretty standard, with one AGP connector and 5 PCI slots.

    The included extras go above and beyond what MSI normally included with their motherboards.  This is normally allot compared to most motherboard manufacturers, but MSI has included quite a few new things.  Some of these are rounded IDE cables and power connectors for SATA hard drives.  The flashing LED fan on the northbridge was annoying for me, but some may actually like it.  The included software covers all of MSI's regular programs, which isn't a bad thing to have.  CoreCell, while looking impressive, isn't that unusual, as all its doing is lowering fan speeds when it thinks it can do so, not the kind of control that I would like to give to the computer.

    The BIOS was well laid out, and had many tweaking options.  One interesting/funny addition was the dynamic overclocking options which have a military theme to it, from Private to General.  The standard overclocking options are very extensive, with a FSB able to reach up to 500MHz (2GHz QDR), as well the CPu voltage can reach up to 2.3v and the ability to lock the AGP/PCI bus speeds.  The RAID BIOS's were functional, with the Promise BIOS providing a little more in the way of information for the user.

    The overclocking of this motherboard was a mixed bag, with the overclocking the older 1.8a Northwood chip not working so well, with the 1GB TwinX PC4000 kit, and memory settings didn't really do well, usually only working at the lowest timings possible.  With the 2.4C processor it overclocked much better, reaching about 288MHz FSB before having some problems.  I was happy with the overclocking ability of the motherboard, but the timings of the memory disappointed me as the memory used runs faster than this motherboard allows it to. The fact that it takes three reboots before the system resets from the a failed overclock is very annoying especially if you are reaching the limit of your overclock. Our first test board had a problem that didn't allow it to reach above 230MHz with the Corsair TwinX 4000 memory at 1:1 ratio and our second test board didn't work. Our third board did allow for the motherboard to reach 250MHz with the memory but nothing more, memory speed wise. The memory problems seem to be a common problem plaguing many 865PE and 875P motherboards that have been released, so MSI isn't alone

    The performance of this motherboard is good, making it a decent upgrade from most 845PE based motherboards.  Compared to other motherboards it does adequately, though we could only test in one piece of synthetic software.  Normally at similar settings the MSI 865PE Neo 2 performed about 3%+ better than the 845PE motherboard.  The hard drive performance was very nice to see, as SATA performance reaches that of the PCI bus bandwidth.  Overall very nice performance from this motherboard from MSI.

    Price has always been a strong point from MSI, with many of their motherboards offering plenty of features still being very inexpensive to buy.  However this is not the case with this motherboard, as somewhat more expensive, compared to the Abit IS7 which offers much of the same features, but at a cost less than the MSI motherboard.  Even compared to many 875 based motherboards it is still nearly as expensive.

Good Points

• Impressive Packaging
• 4 SATA drive headers
• Pretty Good overclocking
• Very good overclocking options
• Dual Channel Memory
• Good Performance

Bad Points

• Poor Memory timing settings
• Higher Price
• Odd overclocking results
• Not as fast as the 875
• Bad Recovery from OC failure

Bottom Line

    A good performing motherboard with all the features you could want, though its poor compatibility with true PC4000 memory is not a good sign. Be aware that this is the case with many Springdale and Canterwood based boards, and make sure that you get a later revision of this motherboard.