Installation

Once the hardware installation is complete the rest is a stroll in the park, at least it was in my case! MSI include their now familiar setup utility which offers you all the required software in a simple, easy to understand interface.

And for access to the radio function from within Windows itself you get a copy of MEGA Radio, along with another popular utility, MSI's Live Update 2 software which lets you search for updated BIOS, chipset drivers and the like.

The MEGA PC came with a surprising lack of technical information, so much so that I wasn't even sure if the board would accept our 3.06 (533MHz) CPU short of popping it in and firing up, which I did! Sandra revealed that all was well.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Info

And while Sandra was fired up here's what it had to report for the motherboard.

SiSoft Sandra Mainboard Info

The graphics drivers installed quickly and easily but as the picture below shows you don't get a great deal to play with where settings are concerned.

And the MEGA Radio utility is a bit big and clunky but that's just about perfect if you're using your TV to display it on. The features are limited pretty much to selecting your station on either AM or FM and recording it to your hard drive but nothing more. That's not a complaint by the way, most users who want to do more with the audio will have their own preferred software and it's quire refreshing to see an app that doesn't try to be all things to all people and over burden itself with features many people will never use. If the MEGA PC was being sold as a high spec radio then this wouldn't be good enough but as a small part of a potentially diverse feature set the radio app is just fine in my book.