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MSI K7N2G-ILSR Review April 08, 2003 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: Do you have an older Athlon system with GeForce2 MX graphics and you're looking to upgrade without emptying your wallet? MSI's K7N2G-ILSR may be the perfect solution for you! With its nForce2 IGP, the K7N2G-ILSR offers integrated GeForce4 MX graphics, and the MCP-T brings Dolby Digital audio straight to your PC. And don't forget other goodies like Serial ATA, AGP 8X, and FireWire. See how this board performs in today's review!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 13 ) |
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The integrated graphics market
Since their inception, integrated chipsets have traditionally been considered anemic, especially among gamers and hardware enthusiasts. This is largely because chipset manufacturers have been slow to adopt the latest hardware technologies in their products. For instance, industry leader Intel utilized its i752 graphics for years in its integrated chipsets. This graphics core was only updated recently with 845GE, despite the fact that it’s based on technology that is over four years old.
Taiwainese manufacturers VIA, ALi, and SiS aren’t much better, just like Intel, their integrated graphics offer performance roughly equivalent to an NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra graphics accelerator. All of these manufacturers have put an emphasis on value, simply providing enough to output to a 2D display, little or no focus has been put on 3D performance.
GeForce graphics inside
When NVIDIA unveiled its nForce chipset in 2001, all the so-called “rules” of integrated chipsets were changed. The nForce integrated graphics processor (IGP) utilized a variant of NVIDIA’s GeForce2 MX graphics core, a DirectX 7 part with hardware transformation and lighting among its list of features. This put the nForce IGP one graphics generation behind the desktop in terms of feature set when it was launched, significantly narrowing the gap between desktop graphics and integrated graphics. For the first time in the history of integrated chipsets, 3D performance was a significant selling factor.
Of course, by now we all know how nForce ultimately played out. Motherboards based on the chipset arrived much later than expected, and was initially priced higher than expected. NVIDIA later released a lower cost variant without the integrated graphics, but by the time it arrived its feature set was beginning to show signs of age, specifically the lack of support for DDR333 memory.
With nForce2 NVIDIA continued to experience problems with delays, but unlike nForce’s debut, the competition wasn’t able to respond with a product to compete. In addition, NVIDIA brought the chipsets without integrated graphics to market first, with motherboards featuring integrated graphics shipping in 2003. nForce2 supports the latest AMD processors and memory types, as well as sporting an enhanced graphics controller with support for NVIDIA’s TwinView technology.
This brings us to MSI’s K7N2G-ILSR. This board fuses NVIDIA’s nForce2 IGP chipset with integrated graphics, with the Dolby Digital supporting MCP-T. On top of this package MSI includes an onboard Serial ATA controller and an external bracket for outputting to your television. And of course, as an MSI motherboard, the K7N2G-ILSR is priced to move.
SIDEBAR: MSI K7N2G-ILSR Product Webpage
| Board Features | Page:: ( 2 / 13 ) |
Integrated graphics
One of the key features of the K7N2G-ILSR is the integrated graphics supported by the nForce2 IGP North Bridge. Since the nForce2 IGP is based on the GeForce4 MX, the graphics core is largely the same as that used on the original nForce chipset. That means you’ll get the same dual pixel pipeline architecture, with the ability to process four texels per clock cycle as the GeForce2 MX family.
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The key additions that you get with the nForce2 IGP are the GeForce4 MX’s crossbar memory architecture as well as the integrated video processing engine, which includes the integrated TV encoder that was mentioned previously. The GPU also runs at 200MHz, with 334MHz memory, placing it somewhere between the GeForce4 MX 420 and GeForce4 MX440 in terms of overall performance. While this may be a little weak for hardcore gamers, keep in mind that this is light years ahead of anyone else in integrated graphics performance. And if an OEM or motherboard manufacturer decides to implement it, the nForce2 IGP can drive two different displays simultaneously.
MCP-T audio
Besides the integrated graphics, the other feature that really turns heads with nForce2 is its Dolby Digital six channel audio. This capability is provided by the MCP-T chip, which is located just below the AGP slot. Realtek’s ALC650 is the physical layer that handles the sound output, and is a popular solution among nForce2 motherboard manufacturers.
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Besides the 5.1 audio, the MCP-T is also responsible for networking and connectivity. Up to six USB 2.0 ports are supported by nForce2 (two external brackets are used to connect all six ports) as is IEEE-1394 (FireWire), which supports up to two devices. For networking duties, the MCP-T offers 10/100 Fast Ethernet.
Serial ATA, D-LED
In addition to these features, MSI includes a few additional goodies of their own. For supporting the next generation of Serial ATA hard drives, Promise’s PDC20376 controller is integrated onboard. Up to two Serial ATA drives can be connected to the controller, or the controller can be used to connect an additional parallel ATA drive.
For troubleshooting problems on system boot up, MSI includes its handy D-Bracket 2. This is an optional accessory that uses a bank of four LEDs to indicate the status of the motherboard. Say for example, the motherboard is testing the system memory. LEDs 1, 3, and 4 will shine. If your memory module(s) is damaged or not installed properly, the system will hang at this point, with the LEDs still shining. If you then looked up the LED combination in your K7N2G-ISLR manual, you’d instantly know that your system didn’t boot up properly because of a problem with your system memory.
This feature in particular takes the guesswork out of diagnosing system problems and is one of the key benefits to owning an MSI motherboard that supports this feature.
SIDEBAR: The K7N2G-ILSR is one of a handful of nForce2 motherboards that has made NVIDIA and Dolby’s PC audio validated list.
| Board Layout | Page:: ( 3 / 13 ) |
In following with MSI tradition, the K7N2G-ILSR sports a red PCB. In fact, not only is the board itself red, so is the AGP slot. This gives the board a snazzier look than the tan or green motherboards we’re used to seeing, and really looks good when paired with a red ATI or MSI card. If you really want to get your color coordination on, you can go with Muskin’s high performance PC3200 memory, which utilizes a red heat spreader.
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Unfortunately, this is a dilemma that we’ve noticed on many nForce2 motherboards, so the K7N2G-ILSR is not unique, but at the very least we would preferred to see the ATX power connector on the other side of the CPU socket. Preferably MSI should have placed the connector on the right edge of the motherboard, behind the DIMM sockets.
Looking around the CPU interface itself, you can see a bank of capacitors that reside very close to the CPU socket. Fortunately, there’s just enough room to install larger heatsinks, and we also see that MSI has placed heatsinks on its voltage regulators. This is an added bonus that you don’t see on many motherboards and should come in handy when the system is under additional load, say for instance when overclocking.
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MSI has also implemented an active cooling solution on the nForce2 IGP, keeping temperatures in check around the upper portion of the motherboard. With even the SPP variant of the nForce2 chipset getting fairly hot under load, we can only imagine how much hotter the IGP chip gets with its integrated graphics controller. With a hot device like the CPU right next to it, and the graphics card (another hot component) beneath, the active cooler on the IGP is a very good feature for MSI to include on the K7N2G-ILSR.
Unfortunately, MSI only includes two fan headers on the K7N2G-ILSR board, and one of those headers is used for the aforementioned fan on the nForce2 IGP. This leaves end users with one fan header, which must be used for the CPU cooler. As a result, this board effectively ships without any additional cooling support.
Fortunately, MSI provides a wealth of space between the DIMM sockets and the AGP slot. In comparison to other motherboards we’ve seen, you could taxi a 747 between the devices. MSI has placed the IDE connectors across from the last three PCI slots, which means you will have to stretch your IDE cables a little more than normal.
SIDEBAR: MSI also offers the K7N2G-L, which ships without the MCP-T and Serial ATA for a lower price.
| BIOS Interface | Page:: ( 4 / 13 ) |
nForce2 motherboards tend to offer many of the same settings in BIOS, regardless of the manufacture of the motherboard. Not only are many of the parameters identical, but in most cases the available settings themselves are also similar, if not the same. For instance, nForce2 motherboards offer an incredible degree of flexibility in tweaking memory timings. Practically every function is adjustable in ranges from the very minimum, all the way to the fastest timings.
As a result, the only area motherboard manufacturers tend to differentiate themselves is in their integrated peripherals section of BIOS (i.e. some motherboards come with more integrated features than others, in the case of the K7N2G-ILSR one of those features would be the Serial ATA controller), voltage adjustment, and the system bus settings themselves.
Lets go over what MSI brings to the table with the K7N2G-ILSR’s BIOS.
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In our testing with older MSI motherboards, we’ve found that they tend to play it safe in the amount of tweaking available in BIOS, and the K7N2G-ILSR is no exception. For instance, voltages are adjustable to 1.80V in 0.025V increments. This is a bit on the conservative side, as we’ve seen many motherboards with settings up to 1.85V, and FIC and Epox boards with settings even higher than that. MSI does have a large number of OEM customers that may not want their users tweaking their CPU voltage too much, or it’s also possible that MSI just wants its end users to play it safe, as excessive voltage can damage your CPU, especially over time. We’re not really certain what the answer is, but it’s likely that this will disappoint many of the hardcore hardware enthusiasts.
MSI also offers settings for manually setting the speed of the AGP bus, as well as its voltage (up to 1.7V) in addition to system memory, which can be set as high as 2.7V. For bus speeds, settings from 100MHz-200MHz are available in 1MHz increments, so MSI offers a nice amount of flexibility in this department.
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Like other nForce2 boards, memory bus settings for DDR200, DDR266, DDR333, and DDR400 are available, and the memory bus and system bus can operate asynchronously, meaning you can run your memory bus at 333MHz while your system bus operates at 266MHz. We have however found that the nForce2 chipset performs best when both buses are running in synch with each other, so we ran all our tests with both the system and memory buses at 333MHz.
Going back and forth from external to integrated graphics is seamless both from a hardware perspective (i.e. there are no jumpers to pull) and from the aspect of software (BIOS). All you have to do is plug in your discrete graphics card, or if you plan on using the nForce2 IGP, connect your monitor to the VGA connector on the back plane of the K7N2G-ILSR motherboard itself. The nForce2 chipset automatically determines the active signal and performs appropriately.
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SIDEBAR: For the SPP, MSI recently unveiled its K7N2 Delta, which adds the MCP-T to the K7N2 platform we tested earlier this year.
| System Setup | Page:: ( 5 / 13 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (333MHz bus)
FIC AU11 Chameleon (nForce2)
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 (nForce2)
MSI K7N2G-ILSR
BIOS Revision 1.2
512MB Corsair XMS3200 CAS2 Memory
ATI RADEON 9700 Pro 128MB
Catalyst 3.0
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA-100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1
DirectX 8.1
Desktop resolution 1024x768, 32-bit color, 75Hz refresh
All power saving options were turned off, as were the Automatic Update and System Restore services. Graphics options under the ‘Performance’ tab were all disabled for maximum performance.
Benchmarks
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake III: Arena version 1.17 ‘Demo001’ demo
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter – 32-bit color, Elephant Atrium demo
Jedi Knight II
Comanche 4
SiSoft Sandra 2003 Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
Content Creation Winstone 2002
Business Winstone 2002
SIDEBAR: MSI stands for Microstar International
| Integrated Graphics | Page:: ( 6 / 13 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003
Unreal Tournament 2003 Botmatch
Notes
The integrated graphics in the nForce2 IGP offers double the performance of NVIDIA’s GeForce2 MX400 card in some situations, this is pretty remarkable considering that GeForce2 MX400 was the leader in the value segment 16 months ago. However, the integrated GPU isn’t quite able to keep up with the GeForce4 MX 440.
SIDEBAR: MSI has already updated its webpage for the K7N2G-ILSR listing support for AMD’s 400MHz bus
| Serious Sam SE | Page:: ( 7 / 13 ) |
Serious Sam SE (Elephant Atrium) – OpenGL
Notes
The IGP-based K7N2G-ILSR isn’t quite able to keep up with the SPP nForce2 boards in Serious Sam 2 at lower resolutions. We’re not sure if this is because of the chipset itself, or perhaps the BIOS on the board needs a bit more tuning. Fortunately, the margin isn’t greater than 4%, so its unlikely that end users will feel the performance difference between either setup.
SIDEBAR: We ran our tests with a revision 1.0 board.
| Quake III: Arena | Page:: ( 8 / 13 ) |
Quake III v.1.17 Demo001 – OpenGL
Notes
We see the same performance trends repeat in Quake 3, and while the margin has opened up slightly, it still rounds up to 4%. Again, it’s possible that the nForce2 IGP isn’t quite as fast as the SPP, as we found that MSI’s SPP board was just as fast as the competition from ASUS.
SIDEBAR: Windows XP detects the nForce2 IGP as “GeForce4 MX Integrated GPU”.
| Comanche 4 | Page:: ( 9 / 13 ) |
Comanche 4 – DirectX 8
SIDEBAR: You can also overclock the nForce2 IGP if you wish.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 | Page:: ( 10 / 13 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby – DirectX 8
Unreal Tournament 2003 Botmatch – DirectX 8
Notes
Even in UT2003 we see the same margins between the IGP-based MSI motherboard and the SPP boards, 4%.
SIDEBAR: MSI is also working on a line of small form factor PCs.
| SiSoft Sandra 2003/Content Creation Tests | Page:: ( 11 / 13 ) |
SiSoft Sandra 2003 Memory Bandwidth
Business Winstone 2002
Content Creation Winstone 2002
Notes
The MSI board takes the crown in Business and Content Creation Winstone 2002, although the memory bandwidth advantage easily goes to the SPP boards.
SIDEBAR: We used NVIDIA’s latest 2.03 drivers for our testing
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 12 / 13 ) |
Pros
nForce2 chipset: NVIDIA’s nForce2 chipset is unquestionably the best chipset currently available for the Athlon XP processor. Don’t believe us? The fact that AMD is shipping all of its processors to media types such as us with nForce2 motherboards speaks for itself. In fact, the presence of the nForce2 chipset is one of the key reasons why AMD is still able to keep up with Intel’s fastest processors.
But not only is the nForce2 chipset the Socket A performance king, it’s also the most feature complete chipset on the market. No other platform on the market offers Dolby Digital encoding on-the-fly in hardware, you’ve also got support for AMD’s rumored upcoming 400MHz system bus.
Integrated graphics: While we know that many of you have GeForce4 Tis and RADEON 9700 cards, there are many more consumers that are still utilizing GeForce2 MX graphics, or worse. For those consumers, nForce2 with the IGP is a very compelling solution. You’ll be upgrading your graphics subsystem, and once you’re ready to step up to a more powerful graphics solution, simply plug it in and go. As we’ve seen in our test results, performance is somewhere between the GeForce2 MX 400 and GeForce4 MX 440. This is considerably more power than the next best integrated graphics solution, which happens to be the original nForce chipset which also comes from NVIDIA. Intel, VIA, and SiS aren’t even close.
Serial ATA: MSI’s K7N2G-ILSR supports the next generation Serial ATA storage technology today thanks to its Promise Serial ATA controller. This is a comforting thought for those of you who wish to use your existing parallel hard drive for now, once Serial ATA hard drives take off you can then upgrade your hard disk and plug it into the K7N2G-ILSR. MSI bundles two Serial ATA cables with the board, so you’re good to go once you’re ready to take the plunge.
Audio: With the integrated MCP-T, the K7N2G-ILSR is a powerful audio solution. Once you hook the K7N2G-ILSR into your home receiver, you can transform your PC into an additional component in your home entertainment system.
Additional features: MSI bundles its boards with unique features such as the previously mentioned D-LED, as well as Live Update, which can keep your BIOS up to date with the latest revisions. MSI also offers its PC Alert 4 hardware monitoring utility which can monitor system parameters such as CPU and system temperatures and voltages, as well as fan speeds.
Price: With so many features, you’d expect the K7N2G-ILSR to come with an exorbitant price tag. However, this is not the case. We found prices nearing the $130 mark from a wide variety of online vendors. While this is roughly $50 more than MSI’s barebones K7N2 motherboard, think of the additional features you’re getting: Serial ATA, MCP-T audio, IEEE-1394, and of course you can’t forget the integrated graphics controller. By itself, a Serial ATA controller will set you back $20-$30, and audio card that will rival the MCP-T will cost more than $50.
Cons
Board layout: While the layout of the K7N2G-ILSR is pretty good, it does have some drawbacks. For instance, the location of the ATX power connector is far from ideal. In its current position it comes dangerously close to the CPU interface and constricts airflow near the upper portion of the board. The presence of only two fan headers is also a real setback.
Tweaking: The lack of CPU voltage settings above 1.80V will hinder end user’s overclocking attempts, we’ve found that most of our Athlon XP chips require 1.85V to overclock to their maximum potential. Therefore, if you’re really looking to push your CPU to its limits, you’ll probably be disappointed with the K7N2G-ILSR unless MSI opens up additional voltage settings with a BIOS update.
SIDEBAR: Other than the CPU and hard drive, MSI manufactures practically every component within a PC.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 13 / 13 ) |