Stability/system setup

Stability

While our 850 Pro is a prerelease sample, system stability was remarkably good in Windows 98 (the only OS we tested with), even when the processor was overclocked. We have a feeling the 850 Pro will be another reliable product from MSI once it's finished.

As far as we can tell, the BIOS is the biggest holdup on the 850 Pro. Newer versions now properly name the CPU Pentium 4 (ours identified it as Willamette, the codename of the Pentium 4) and change a few of the default BIOS settings, but as we mentioned before, a few of the settings we use to overclock CPUs are missing.

Since this is a jumperless motherboard, this leaves the BIOS and MSI's Fuzzy Logic utility as the only options to manipulate settings such as core voltage and system bus speed (Although third-party overclocking programs will likely be available for the Pentium 4 at some point). The Fuzzy Logic 3 software bundled with our board didn't appear to support the clock generator used by our eval unit.

Test System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 1.4-1.6GHz

MSI 850 Pro
Intel D850GB
Intel chipset driver ver. 2.30.021b
Intel Ultra ATA storage driver ver. 6.03

256MB PC800 RDRAM

ELSA GLADIAC GeForce2 Ultra
Driver version Detonator 6.31

30GB IBM Deskstar 75GXP ATA/100 Hard Drive

Windows 98 SE

DirectX 8.0

Benchmarks

Winbench 99 1.1
Business Disk Winmarks
High-End Disk Winmarks

SiSoft Sandra 2001 CPU tests - Dhrystone, Whetstone, MMX, SSE, HD, ALU/memory, FPU/memory tests

Content Creation 2000

Winstone 99 ver. 1.3

3DMark2000 ver 1.1

Unreal Tournament - 640x480x32
Unreal Tournament - 800x600x32
Unreal Tournament - 1024x7680x32
Unreal Tournament - 1280x1024x32

Quake 3 Retail - 640x480 Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 800x600 Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1024x768 Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1280x1024 Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1600x1200 Normal, High Quality

MDK2 - 640x480x32
MDK2 - 800x600x32
MDK2 - 1024x768x32
MDK2 - 1280x1024x32
MDK2 - 1600x1200x32

Notes

We cut a few of the synthetic tests out for this preview, but added a new one: SiSoft Sandra 2001. Sandra 2001 adds one new test (SSE2 Whetstone) and fully supports the Pentium 4 processor. For comparison, we included the numbers from our Pentium 4 preview with the Intel motherboard to see how our prerelease 850 Pro stacks up against Intel's board.