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Installation
NVIDIA's
nForce drivers have certainly come a long way since
I took a look at the preproduction ASUS board that
AMD used to launch their 333MHz CPUs some while back.
As expected MSI have wrapped the drivers and utilities
in their usual, friendly front end and driver installation
went without a hitch I'm pleased to say.
There
was a nice assortment of utilities available off the
installation CD including apps for hardware monitoring,
freeing memory, speeding cable modems and XDSL, viewing
and configuring system settings........
..........and
of course MSI's famed Live Update software. Also Trend
PC-cilin antivirus software and assortment of other
useful bits and bobs.
The
"Website" tab contains links to a few of
sites that you might need to get to including one
that offers a free personal Firewall app.
While
the "Manual" tab does as its name would
suggest and links to the users manuals for Live Update
2 and GoodMem memory management software. There are
also a couple of other useful little apps on the CD
that don't appear here.
The
Hardware monitoring software I mentioned is MSI's
PC Alert 4 which does a nice job of displaying all
the main info in a simple, easy to understand way.
Then
there's Live Update 2 which basically scours MSI's
servers for various updates and compares their version
to the one you currently have installed making update
decisions so much easier.
Another
feature you'll see mentioned on the box is MSI's Fuzzy
Logic overclocking utility which is now at version
4. What I don't understand though is why it was mentioned
on the box but wasn't on the installation CD. In the
end I had to grab it off their site and even this
wasn't easy as the link to it is tucked away alongside
details for each of the specific motherboards. I couldn't
find a general link to it from the main page.
The BIOS
MSI
have done a nice job of the BIOS with a good set of
tweaks and tricks but some of the tame upper ranges
are going to turn hardened overclockers away. Many
of the regular features will be familiar to you so
let's pick out one or two of the more interesting
ones.
The
Advanced Chipset Features screen offers most of the
performance settings that are likely to be needed
including memory timings. Both System Performance
and CPU interface can be set for Manual, Auto or High
Performance settings. I couldn't actually get the
system to boot using the high performance setting
under "System Performance" though I was
able to set this to manual and set CPU Interface to
"High Performance".
Notice
that when you have no graphics card installed the
integrated graphics automatically enable and add two
extra functions to this page, "Frame Buffer Size"
which sets how much system memory is to be used by
the video subsystem, and TV-Out Mode which does what
the name suggests.
Even with the FSB at
a fairly humble 133MHz there are a huge variety of
FSB/DRAM ratios available with the highest (2:1) forcing
a rather high 267MHz (below)
While
the lowest setting of 2:1 brings this down to a nostalgic
66MHz. Because of the way NVIDIA have optimised the
nForce2 you're almost certainly going to want this
set to 1:1 so memory and FSB run synchronously.
Because
the AGP bus is decoupled you can set independent AGP
frequencies between 66 and 120 MHz.
And
AGP voltage can be set at 1.5,1.6 or 1.7 volts.
DRAM
voltage has a range of 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 volts which
is almost certainly too low to appeal to more adventurous
overclockers who'll be searching out the first voltage
mod to come along.
Manual
CPU ratios are selectable up to 13x which should be
high enough for FSB overclocking on current CPUs.
And
to help with stability CPU voltage can be taken up
to 1.80v if needed.
Because
the K7N2G uses the Athlon's thermal diode the CPU
temperatures can get a little disconcerting at times
and even allowing for thermal diode use the temps
do seem a touch higher than I'd have expected.
Both
NIC options are available on the MCP-T controller
but both the -L and the -ILSR use only one.
Physical Installation
Installing
the board was like installing just about every other
though I did have one or two issues worthy of a moan.
Firstly,
both models mount using only six screws which leaves
a large section of them unsupported. What's perhaps
worse is that the unsupported are is where the memory
and IDE connectors plug in and this creates a lot
of flexing if you're not careful.
The
other problem concerns the "S Bracket" needed
to add the extra audio ports. Because of the bulky
plastic casing behind the bracket I couldn't find
a single slot where it would screw into place without
applying pressure to components below it on the board.
Perhaps I could have eased the problem by fitting
slightly shorter stand-offs but as these were supplied
with the case (an Antec SX1230 clone for reference)
I didn't see why it should be necessary.
Just
about the only place I felt comfortable screwing it
down was on top of the BIOS chip but even here it
exerted a fair amount of downward pressure when secured
tightly.
Okay,
let's move on and take a look at performance levels.
I'll be performing most of the testing using a stand-alone
graphics card in order to help compare the board with
other systems but as this is an IGP version it seems
only right we look at integrated video performance
first.
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