Last week I was fortunate enough to get a "Granite Bay" board - MSI GNB Max. My P4 2.8 arrived last night (finally) so I thought that some of you guys would like to hear about the board....
The package itself was sweet and had lots of goodies - typical MSI fashion. I was very happy to see RAID drivers on a floppy, lots of boards don't do that for you it seems. My board didn't come with the bluetooth base unit which was a dissapointment, the online info made me think it would.
Setup was pretty straight forward and easy. I was a little anoyed that some capacitors were located near the edge of the board by the PCI slots - this blocked some of the included MSI brackets and forced me to put the audio bracket in the lowest PCI slot. Finished the connections and powered up heading for the BIOS powering my box was a P4 2.8 and dual 512 MB sticks of Corsair XMS 3500.
The BIOS is pretty lame. I was expecting this based on all of the online reviews I had read but still, quite the dissapointment. Almost NO overclocking adjustments of any type. I wasn't even able to set AGP 8x or PCI ratios. CAS values and FSB adjustments were about it.
XP installation went very fast, the thing was blistering fast. I installed the chipset drivers and then used MSI "auto install" to install the remaining drivers. For some odd reason, the auto install neglected to load the USB drivers and I had to do that manually - I wonder why they skipped that? Next I loaded the new ATI catalyst drivers for my Radeon 9700. This is about the time I started seeing problems - random lock ups & reboots. I checked the system event log and saw lots of red...most centered around my HD "...loss of communication"...strange, what's that about? I was using both the onboard Promise RAID and a High Point 1520 SATA RAID card and thought perhaps that was the problem. I disabled the Promise RAID and things seemed to resolve themselves.
Then I put on the MSI "Fuzzy Logic 4" software and the latest version of Sandra. I turned off the box and removed one of the units of RAM - I was currious to see the RAM bench in both dual and single mode. Rebooted and ran Sandra - a very unimpressive 1950 in single channel mode. Replaced the second unit of RAM and rebenched: 3200 @ 133 MHz - HOLY CRAP!
Time to try some overclocking. Using Fuzzy Logic, I was able to get to 147 MHz w/out increasing any voltages. Not bad, 2.8 becomes 3.09 GHz and the click of a button. I rebenched the memory and almost soiled myself - 3750!
I set Sandra to continously loop the burn in and called it a night. Before I left for work this morning, I checked in and things hadn't locked up and the loop was still running.
I'll be happy to keep you guys posted if anyone is interested - let me know what else you'd like to know.
-D
The package itself was sweet and had lots of goodies - typical MSI fashion. I was very happy to see RAID drivers on a floppy, lots of boards don't do that for you it seems. My board didn't come with the bluetooth base unit which was a dissapointment, the online info made me think it would.
Setup was pretty straight forward and easy. I was a little anoyed that some capacitors were located near the edge of the board by the PCI slots - this blocked some of the included MSI brackets and forced me to put the audio bracket in the lowest PCI slot. Finished the connections and powered up heading for the BIOS powering my box was a P4 2.8 and dual 512 MB sticks of Corsair XMS 3500.
The BIOS is pretty lame. I was expecting this based on all of the online reviews I had read but still, quite the dissapointment. Almost NO overclocking adjustments of any type. I wasn't even able to set AGP 8x or PCI ratios. CAS values and FSB adjustments were about it.
XP installation went very fast, the thing was blistering fast. I installed the chipset drivers and then used MSI "auto install" to install the remaining drivers. For some odd reason, the auto install neglected to load the USB drivers and I had to do that manually - I wonder why they skipped that? Next I loaded the new ATI catalyst drivers for my Radeon 9700. This is about the time I started seeing problems - random lock ups & reboots. I checked the system event log and saw lots of red...most centered around my HD "...loss of communication"...strange, what's that about? I was using both the onboard Promise RAID and a High Point 1520 SATA RAID card and thought perhaps that was the problem. I disabled the Promise RAID and things seemed to resolve themselves.
Then I put on the MSI "Fuzzy Logic 4" software and the latest version of Sandra. I turned off the box and removed one of the units of RAM - I was currious to see the RAM bench in both dual and single mode. Rebooted and ran Sandra - a very unimpressive 1950 in single channel mode. Replaced the second unit of RAM and rebenched: 3200 @ 133 MHz - HOLY CRAP!
Time to try some overclocking. Using Fuzzy Logic, I was able to get to 147 MHz w/out increasing any voltages. Not bad, 2.8 becomes 3.09 GHz and the click of a button. I rebenched the memory and almost soiled myself - 3750!
I set Sandra to continously loop the burn in and called it a night. Before I left for work this morning, I checked in and things hadn't locked up and the loop was still running.
I'll be happy to keep you guys posted if anyone is interested - let me know what else you'd like to know.
-D