While Magic-Pro is a relatively unknown company
here in North America, this board did pretty well in the benchmarking
suites; performing on par with i865PE boards from AOpen and Albatron. If the stock performance
is not good enough for you, the MP-P6PE-1000 is a pretty good overclocker,
and features some nice overclocking options in the BIOS to boot.
The Magic-Pro MP-P6PE-1000 retails for around $170
CDN ($125 US) which places it in the
middle of the pack in terms of pricing. The board does not come with much in the way
of features, but has a 3Com 10/100 NIC and 5.1 audio included. The motherboard does
have Serial ATA as well, but I no longer consider that an "extra" as all motherboards with
the ICH5/ICH5R have Serial ATA.
The Magic-Pro MP-P6PE-1000 is very user friendly, the PCB is very well
labelled and when you do browse the manual it's easy to use. Newbie's need not
fear trying to install this motherboard themselves. The main IDE and ATX power
connectors are in their most ideal location to the right of the DIMM slots.
I was surprised that this retail sample Magic-Pro
MP-P6PE-1000 did not come with any driver CD..... perhaps it was missed
in this one instance. The floppy drive connector is located in a bad position just
under the fifth PCI slot, it makes things difficult if you have larger cases.
Because of the close proximity of the Northbridge and AGP slot, users with
large after market GPU coolers (like the Zalman ZM80A-HP) may have problems installing
their videocards with the extra cooling hardware attached.
The MP P6PE-1000 is a good motherboard for mainstream
users, and features just enough to satisfy their typical requirements. There
are higher performing boards out there, but with an attractive price tag users with budgets
should be well satisfied.
Thanks to Canada Computers for providing this Magic-Pro motherboard to
PCstats.com for testing.
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