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With its' distinctive three and one RIMM slot orientation, the MSI 850 Pro2 is set to capture the attention of the ever increasing P4 market.
86% Rating: 
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MSI 850 Pro2 P4 Motherboard Review
With its' distinctive three and one RIMM
slot orientation, the MSI 850 Pro2 is set to capture the attention of the ever
increasing market for P4 mainboards. Based on a four layer PCB and the Intel i850
Tehama chipset this board comes equipped with such features as MSI's USB PC
to PC, DLed diagnostics, onboard AC'97 audio and dual ATA-100 channels.
For this
review we will be testing out the MSI 850
Pro2 with a very speedy 1.7 GHz Pentium 4. Of course a little overclocking on the side
won't hurt either as we explore this new mainboard from Micro Star International.
| MSI 850 Pro2 Motherboard |
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Ships with the following:
- IDE ATA66 CABLE
- IDE ATA100 Cable
- FDD CABLE
- USB PC to PC bracket
- USB PC to PC cable
- Heatsink retention mechanism and clips
- 2x CRIMM's
- Driver CD-ROM
- Instructions
- D-Led instructions
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The Intel i850 Tehama chip is an FC-BGA chipset supporting dedicated
data paths for additional bandwidth via Intel's
netburst architecture. The 82850 memory controller hub is capable of delivering
dual memory channels, AGP4X support and a 400MHz system bus to the system
board.
In conjunction
with the i850 Tehama, the 82801BA
I/O controller hub (ICH2) delivers increased I/O bandwidth with dedicated data
paths and direct connections from the memory and graphics for added
peripheral support.
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| Northbridge |
Southbridge |
The 400MHz
system bus of this i850-based motherboard enables dual memory channels as we mentioned, which
allow up to 3.2GB/s of memory bandwidth to the Pentium 4 processor. Other
features of the Tehama chipset include an AGP4X interface, support
for four USB ports, onboard six-channel audio compliments of the not
so spiffy AC'97 audio codec, a generally unused LAN connect interface, dual
ATA-100 controllers and the almost completely pointless CNR (communications and
networking riser).
The 850 Pro2 features
only a scant four PCI cards, and one CNR. It comes with ATA-100
IDE support and four 184-pin RIMM slots that will support up to
2GB of RDRAM. As we mentioned, onboard sound is standard thanks to the
i850 chipset, but it can be toggled off if desired simply by shorting a jumper.
The 2MB EEPROM BIOS from Phoenix is easy to use and has several important
features MSI is known for. These features should keep the performance user interested for
quite some time.
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