www.Viperlair.com - MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR

The upgrade bug is a fiendish devil at times, occasionally sneaking up on enthusiasts without warning. It can often be difficult to resist the temptations of the latest and the greatest in an effort to squeeze out that little extra performance or gain new hardware features. In the motherboard market things usually happen a bit more slowly when compared to items such as CPU's and graphics cards although motherboards upgrade cycles are gaining momentum as new ideas and features are implemented. When it comes to the AMD platform there was a time when VIA and SiS were pretty much the only players of consequence. Then nVidia stepped up to the plate with there nForce chipset. Things didn't go too well however as the first nForce chipset was a little late to market and no real match performance wise with the competition, despite being a good platform in its own right. But that was then and this is now.

Unlike its predecessor the nForce2 chipset has proven itself to be king of the hill when it comes to AMD performance platforms, with a very aggressive price point that has yet to be matched. Times however change, and with the introduction of the 3200+ Barton sporting a 200 FSB, a revision of this chipset was called for. Whilst the original nForce2 supports DDR400, it doesn't officially support 400 FSB and as we have come to learn, the best performance can be found when running your FSB and memory synchronously. This is where the nForce 2 Ultra 400 steps in. Providing official support for a 400 FSB, as well as providing headroom for the enthusiast crowd, this chipset promises to be the best AMD platform until Athlon64's show up on the scene. With this in mind have added to there line-up a new Flagship AMD motherboard in the guise of the , which obviously is what we shall be looking at today. Is this one for the upgrade bug to pounce on you with?

The specifications are very impressive with the board hosting a broad array of features and extras. Not only does the board itself pack a lot but the whole package has a good amount to offer too, with things like the D Bracket 2, the S Bracket, and a FireWire (1394) bracket.

The box is very attractive, sporting a motorcycle and some of the logo's for the technology used such as the nForce2 and DDR 400. Inside the box, apart from the motherboard itself and its extra's we find some DVD Software, drivers, and a couple of manuals. There is one very attractive red, round IDE cable along with a floppy cable and since this is a SATA Raid motherboard, MSI have also seen fit to include 2 SATA leads and matching SATA power cable.

Ok, anyone who hasn't been living under a rock will by now know that currently the nVidia nForce2 chipset is regarded as THE motherboard chipset to have for an Athlon setup. Until now there were 2 flavours of this chipset, the basic model with SPP northbridge and the IGP version that included integrated GeForce 4 MX graphics onboard. Now with the success of those 2 platforms as well as the move to 400FSB Barton's appearing, nVidia have updated there line-up with 2 new versions dubbed the nForce2 400 and nForce2 Ultra 400.

MSI's K7N2 Delta-ILSR is based on the latter of these 2 new breeds and brings with it official support for 400MHz FSB's. The Ultra 400 revision is more of an evolution to accommodate the latest features rather than a revolution. Apart from that, as the Ultra name would suggest, the nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset is mainly an optimization when compared with the original nForce2. MSI would seem to understand this and have chosen to go with the Delta tag rather than Ultra which I think is a good idea personally, although it could cause a little confusion in the marketplace when viewed with competitors who decide to use the Ultra tag. The 400 tag is obviously the bit indicating the faster FSB speed. The MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR also uses the MCP-T which provides support for nVidia's Soundstorm audio certification (although this motherboard doesn't actually have that certification), dual LAN, Firewire, up to 6 ports of USB 2.0 as well as ATA133 IDE.

The Board
As Hubert has done in the K7N2G-ILSR review, I'm going to breakdown the naming convention here which should hopefully give you an idea of what you're getting upfront. The K7N2 indicates it's an Athlon nForce 2 motherboard. The Delta indicates this is from the nForce2 400 line-up, in the this case the 400 Ultra. The "I" is for IEEE1394 (FireWire), "L" for LAN, and the "SR" is Serial ATA RAID.

Once again we see a fire engine red PCB which will look very attractive in any case window. You can also see from the overview picture that MSI have coloured the 3 memory slots green and purple which serves to indicate Dual Channel memory configurations as we shall see a bit later.

Ok, let's start our tour of the board with the CPU area. Enthusiasts will immediately note the lack of the 4 mounting holes around the CPU socket, and whilst this doesn't affect me personally, it will be something that is going to be of concern to others, especially those with Swiftech heatsinks or watercooling systems that utilize those four holes. This is however in-line with AMD's specifications which removes this form of mounting. It's placed nicely at the top of the motherboard, which is personally my favourite place, but coupled with the power socket locations (read below) could mean that you will find yourself cramping the wiring between the HSF and PSU. Another down-point is the location of the power connectors for the motherboard. Sitting just left of the CPU socket we find a standard 20 pin ATX connector as well as a 4 pin AUX connector as usually found on P4 motherboards. Going back to the specifications you can see that there are a lot of integrated features which makes the extra power connection less of a surprise. However the location for both of these is not ideal in that chances are you are going to be draping your power cables across your HSF setup. The orientation of the ATX connector means that you will need to get your fingers in between it and the back I/O panel when removing the ATX connector which for someone with larger hands could be an issue. Conversely the 4 Pin P4 AUX connecter unclips in the reverse of the ATX connecter, meaning you need to get fingers between the connector and capacitors around the CPU area. Whilst not a problem per say since not everyone is going to be removing these connectors repeatedly, I thought it worth a mention.

The 'northbridge' features a rather fetching active cooling solution of a heatsink with clear bladed fan, with the impeller attached to a housing that drops the blades into the 'sink. The clear blades and aluminium look is quite appealing and matches well with the mosfet 'sinks just above it.

As with the K7N2G-ILSR the 8x AGP slot has been coloured red, and whilst it doesn't serve any functional purpose it is a nice colour. Considering the fact that the AGP slot, memory slots and ACR riser slot are coloured it would make sense for the PCI slots to be coloured as well, but this isn't the case. One thing that is a big bonus from my point of view as a reviewer is that the AGP slot clip which holds AGP cards in place is clear of the memory slots, which even in the case of a Ti4600 means that you shouldn't need to remove the card to get the memory out. The blue slot indicates the ACR slot, and whilst it won't be relevant to many who buy this motherboard retail, it will provide an extra connection possibility that would probably appeal in the OEM market.

As I mentioned before, the memory slots are coloured green and purple which serve as an indication for installing ram in a Dual Channel configuration, one of the big selling points of nForce2 chipset motherboards. Some may find it confusing in that one would think that putting 2 sticks into the purple slots, and therefore keeping the colours the same would give you a Dual Channel configuration. This isn't the case however, as is explained in the manual you will need one in a purple slot and one in the green slot. I guess it all depends on how you think. I don't personally feel that anyone has come up with a satisfactory way of visually indicating this feature at a glance as yet.

In between the memory slots and the IDE connectors we find the southbridge or MCP-T chip just left of the battery and Clear CMOS jumper. This chip which supplies support for dual LAN, Firewire, up to 6 ports of USB 2.0 as well as ATA133 IDE, is covered with a green sticker showing off the fact that this board has official support for 400 FSB.

Moving down we find the 3 IDE connectors (just under the battery and Clear CMOS jumper), one of which is reserved for RAID as supplied by the Promise PDC20376 controller. This controller also gives us support for the 2 SATA headers, and it's possible to RAID both the SATA ports or one SATA and the Promise supplied IDE port. SATA hasn't as yet become mainstream but things are moving in that direction so inclusion of these two headers will help to future proof (if such a thing is possible) your motherboard somewhat. Having the IDE and SATA headers this low down is a great position as chances are this is where your Hard Drives are going to be found, in the lower half of your system. The floppy header is higher up on the board and should hopefully provide a bit of extra length in reaching the floppy drive in those systems that have it at the top rather than the bottom. Users of cases without removable motherboard trays might have a bit of a difficult time with the HDD LED header and its brethren, since they are right down at the bottom of the board, and just under IDE 1. This means you'll need to install those before putting in the IDE leads.

The back I/O panel has all the features that have become common nowadays. Starting from the left we have the 2 P/S2 ports for keyboard and mouse, followed by 2 of the USB 2.0 ports. Next are the Parallel and Serial ports, one of each although there is room for a second serial port. Not a big annoyance since the use of serial ports has dropped a lot in this age of USB. Next up are the LAN and 2 more USB ports, again of the USB 2.0 standard. And finally we find the sound jacks, as controlled by the Realtek ALC650 6-channel audio.

All in all, the board layout isn't bad apart from the power connectors, and overall looks fully featured (as it is) but not overly cramped.

The BIOS is once again of the Pheonix - Award BIOS which is personally my favourite. There are a lot of options here both for the general user and the avid enthusiast. All of the screens you have come to expect from this form of BIOS are present as well as here and there a few little gems and extras. System performance can be controlled from a 3 choice menu, and I suspect that these choices will dictate a minor overclock, unless on manual. If you do want to have a play you will have to set the System Performance tab to Manual or the options you will want will be 'greyed out'.

The CPU can also be set for either Normal or High Performance which basically means either having the CPU at the settings you have chosen or overclocking the FSB for another 7MHz. The CPU frequency goes all the way up to 250MHz FSB which is quite a way up the scale, although with Barton's now running 400 FSB it probably won't be long before even this scale won't be high enough for enthusiasts.

Memory settings are good, with the FSB/DRAM ratios having 8 different settings, allowing great flexibility in choosing how you want to set up your system, although most will know by now to run the system synchronously for best performance. There are also settings for four memory timings such as the CAS latency option. Like the CPU Frequency, if you want to have a play, you'll need to set the memory timings to manual and also here if you're not an overclocker you can choose between standard (By SPD) and high performance settings. AGP settings are also in this section with the memory timings, allowing you to control the AGP Fast Writes, 8x enable and Spread Spectrum.

There is one thing in the BIOS that I simply have to point out; Frequency and Voltages have there own menu. This is great in that the main overclocking options for serious tweakers are accessible from one menu. What isn't great though is the Core Voltage options. Like the rest of the bios it's easy enough to choose what voltage you want but the core voltage tops out at only 1.8v which for enthusiasts is low. DIMM voltage has 4 options to choose from, hardware, 1.5,1.6 and 1.7v.

All in all the BIOS is pretty damn good. I would have liked to have seen the CPU Multiplier in the same menu as the FSB and voltages, and would have liked a little extra on the Core voltage but I'm not going to hold it against the board considering my overclocking results.

Before we get straight into the overclocking nitty gritty, there is one thing I would like to point out. Slapping in our Barton 2500+ did NOT unlock the multipliers. I would guess that a BIOS update will fix this but no guarantees here, since our K7N2G-ILSR was the same way inclined. Until then, if you want to unlock your Barton you will have to do it the old fashioned way of bridging the L3 #5 bridge with some conductive paint (or whatever is your preferred method) where upon you'll be able to access multipliers of 13 and under.

were kind enough to send us a Barton 2500+ for this review based on the same core as the new 3200+'s so my hope was there would be a little bit of headroom here. I started with the FSB, jumping from 11x166 to 11x170, just to get the ball rolling. Naturally this was no problem at all. Indeed at 11x180 there was no indication of instability at all.

Feeling brave I increased the Multiplier to 11.5, so that now we had 11.5x180 for 2070MHz. Again no problems at all. Making jumps of 5 on the FSB I got to 11.5x185 for 2127MHz before I hit my first BSOD during testing. Extra voltage didn't help either so I lowered the voltage on the core back to 1.65v and the multiplier to give us 11x185 for 2035MHz. The system was running strong so increasing the FSB took us to 190 and past it to 200. Didn't seem to be any issues here either, still stable as a rock.

It wasn't till we got to 11x215 we got another BSOD during bootup of WindowsXP. Backing off to 11x210 in 1MHz increments and increasing voltage to 1.675v on the core got us stable again. At this point we lowered the Mulitplier down to 10.5, for a 10.5x 210 at which point we proceded to increase the FSB once again. By 10.5x 219 we still had no issues.

At 10.5x221 the K7N2 Delta-ILSR died on me. No amount of CMOS reset would bring it back to life. By now some of you will have read about this happening on nForce2 boards, and it's something we have had our share of here at the lair. However, there's also a little trick you can do to get the PC to boot up again, and that's install a 100FSB processor like a Duron. Not having one of these I was kind of stuck but MSI to the rescue! They saw fit to include a Jumper on the motherboard to hard select your FSB, so you can choose safe mode defaults at 100FSB or 133/166+. This is stated in the manual right next to the page on CMOS reset jumper, and explains that if the computer hangs on POST you should close this Jumper. Switching the jumper breathed new life into the motherboard and we were up and running again. Highest FSB I could get was at 10.5x219. Reducing the Multiplier, changing voltages or lowering the ram timing's didn't avail me any extra, which is fine because that's a pretty good overclock on its own.

I have to give a shout out to MSI here as I really thought the board was dead, but that little J10 jumper for the FSB was a great addition. How reliable it is, is another matter entirely but I've personally used it 3 times during testing without any problems.

MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR, AMD Barton 2500+ @ 10.5x219 (Supplied by ), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, Gainward GeForce4 Ti4600, W&CC AMD WaterCooling Kit, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1.

ABIT NF7-S, AMD Barton 2500+, 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, Gainward GeForce4 Ti4600, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1.

TMPGEnc AVI-to-MPG Encoding
2003 CPU Tests
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Jedi Knight 2

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds.

As expected there is hardly any difference in the K7N2 Delta-ILSR and the ABIT NF7-S, since they are both based on the same chipset. But you can really see the MSI board flex its muscles when overclocked, putting in some impressive numbers.

Memory scores show something interesting. The MSI board pulls just in front of the ABIT NF7-S although in real world terms you wont notice the difference. Once again at 10.5x219, the K7N2 Delta-ILSR puts in some fantastic numbers.

No real surprises here, both boards are neck and neck until we 'free the reins' as it were and overclock the MSI board.

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better.

Here we can see something interesting in that the ABIT NF7-S is left behind somewhat. PiFast is said to be very memory intensive, and going by the scores here it would seem that the MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR has a slight advantage over the ABIT board. Of course, in the real world mileage is going to vary.

Video editing is a taxing chore, and we'll be testing the K7N2 Delta-ILSR using TMPGEnc 2.512 to encode a 7.78MB, 1:30 movie trailer to a 23FPS MPG file. You can grab a screenshot of our settings here. Note that lower scores are better.

Both boards perform on par with one another which is to be expected, and this test really shows the power of a high FSB coupled with Dual Channel memory.

UT2K3 is a real system killer, and can bring many systems to its knees. We used the [H]ardocp UT2003 Benchmarking utility version 2.1, which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test, which uses the dm-inferno map.

Once again both boards put in good numbers and once again they are neck and neck until the K7N2 Delta-ILSR is overclocked. Nothing surprising here.

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.

Jedi Knight II stresses the system more than Quake III Arena but the nForce 2 400 Ultra chipset is more than up to the task. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, both boards are neck and neck.

We're still up in the air about 3D Mark 2003 here at VL and I for one don't particularly trust what it tells me. But it is useful for the CPU tests.

Again no surprises here. Both the NF7-S and the K7N2 Delta are on par with each other, neither one having a great advantage over the other. And once again when overclocked the scores take a healthy boost.

Subsystem Testing

The first thing we'll check is the audio. We downloaded and installed to test its CPU utilization.

Peaking at about 3 1/2 % utilization the sound solution is on par with other Realtek sound codecs I've seen. In this day and age of machines running above 2GHz I don't think those few extra cycles will be missed.

Quality wise it is good. Highs can be a bit tinny but this can be tweaked easy enough, with mid range and bass being just about right for both gaming and music. The nForce2 drivers give a lot of options to tweak the sound how you want which can go a long way to improving things if you have a less than stellar speaker setup.

Hard Drive Performance

ATA Performance (Regular IDE)

Firing up HD Tach we found that CPU Utilization was at 9.3% which is pretty high, and an access time of 13.1ms.

LAN Testing

We used to test the networking speed, and Windows Task Manager for CPU usage. We copied a variety of install files, varying in size of 3MB to as much as 70MB per file from the MSI machine, to our ABIT AT7 Max.

Download speeds averaged about 8.9MB/sec, and upload speeds about 9.6MB/sec. The CPU usages was very low, averaging about 8% which is nice to see.

Final Words

One thing to bear in mind here is that if you already have an nForce2 SPP motherboard, chances are that unless you absolutely need FSB 400 support and want to squeeze out every last bit of performance, you will probably want to sit tight and wait for Athlon64. If you have yet to jump on the nForce2 bandwagon then now is the time to do it. The K7N2 Delta-ILSR is a great performing motherboard with a lot of integrated features and extra's to keep you connected and able to perform the tasks that matter most to you. Whilst board layout had a few annoying areas it was generally good, allowing for HDD and FDD leads to be placed correctly and without issues of crossed/messy cabling (with the power connector exceptions).

The nForce2 Ultra 400 screams along providing you with fantastic gaming performance as well as being more than capable of performing day to day tasks. At default settings the K7N2 Delta-ILSR is more than capable with keeping up it's brethren from other manufacturers, and under overclocked settings is just as happy to show off. MSI are very well known for stability historically, and the K7N2 Delta-ILSR is no exception to this. Despite my best attempts to kill the board with FSB overclocking, it didn't actually die until an FSB of 221MHz, which considering the low voltage and aggressive memory timings is pretty impressive. And I was still able to bring the board back to life without the need for a Duron being handy thanks to the 100FSB/133-166+ jumper on the motherboard. Bios options were overall good and easy to use, although some may find the 1.8v maximum on the CPU Core a little low.

MSI have created a pretty damn good board here, and I have no hesitation in recommending it, but bear in mind the question; Do you NEED 400 FSB support. If you can answer no to this and you already have an nForce2 based motherboard then you may as well stay with it. If you don't have an nForce2 motherboard, or need that 400FSB support then this board should be on your short list.

Pros
Fantastic performance
Great stability when overclocking
Very good looking board
Lots of features
Memory slots are away from AGP slot
Nice locations for IDE and FDD headers

Cons
CPU Core maximum voltage could be considered a bit low
Poor locations on power connectors

Bottom Line
The board is one of the best I have seen, with screaming performance and very good overclocking results. However if you already have an nForce2 based motherboard you would be better to hold out until the Athlon 64 arrives and the boards to go with it.