Introduction

850 Arrives!

Last Monday MSI was able to supply us with a prerelease engineering sample of their 850 motherboard, the 850 Pro. Since then, we've been dabbling with the motherboard in an attempt to find out what a typical custom-built Pentium 4 rig can do. So far, things are looking pretty good.

Boasting five PCI slots, one CNR, and one AGP Pro slot, the 850 Pro's (MS-6339) basic featureset mirrors the D850GB motherboard Intel sent us. In fact, besides a few layout differences, the boards nearly look identical. One area where the 850 Pro really excels however is in the BIOS. While the D850GB only provides a handful of settings to adjust, the 850 Pro features everything we'd expect out of an MSI motherboard. Well, almost. Our BIOS didn't allow bus speed or CPU voltage adjustment, but MSI plans to implement both of these features.

850 Pro w/ P4 installed

850 Pro system running

Fortunately, our Pentium 4 processor is an engineering sample, leaving the clock multiplier unlocked. We took advantage of this and overclocked our Pentium 4 to 1.6GHz. We believe this is the maximum supported by engineering samples sent to the press.

Here are the rest of the 850 Pro's features:

Features

Intel 850/ICH2 chipset

168-pin Gold-lead RIMM x4, maximum 2.0GB RDRAM

1x AGP, 5x PCI, 1x CNR

Jumperless Design

Supports 1X/2X/4X AGP Mode

Supports Ultra DMA 66/100 Hard Drives

Audio ICH2 chip integrated/ Creative CT5880 optional

Board Size: 12" x 9.6", 6 layers PCB, ATX Form Factor

Besides MSI and Intel, ASUS and Gigabyte are also releasing 850 motherboards for the Pentium 4. In particular, ASUS and MSI have a history of producing motherboards geared for overclockers. This is why we're looking forward to retail 850 products from both companies -- we can't wait to see how high we can really push our 1.5GHz processor!

D-LED

Adjusting clock multiplier in BIOS