Motherboard: MSI 845 Ultra :: Installation

We saw some ergonomic problems on the board. The location of power supply connector is between memory slots and floppy socket. It is not an ideal place. It covers memory slots. But it is not easy to design a board with RAID, sound, additional USB 2.0 all of these features, and within a reasonable size.

A new feature, which we started to see on the new top motherboards, is this secure AGP slots. If you are an OEM customer when you are shipping PC's, AGP cards can slip away from their slots easily. In that case, when you try to boot PC, you will get no screen. I have seen this problem many times. Most of the testers don't use cases. We just put the motherboard on a desk and install the AGP card. Heavy VGA cables cause the same slipping problem. Now we can "click" to secure the card easily. Back then; some of the motherboard manufacturers have other solutions like the additional AGP securing part.

Without taking out the AGP card it is not possible to install the first memory module. But most motherboards have this problem.

If you are trying to find a place for all of additional ports, sound and RAID chips there will be some location problems. D-Bracket connector on board is stuck between two PCI slots.

But I got to mention again that it is not easy to design a board with RAID, sound, additional USB 2.0 all of these features. I think design is successful with all of these features on board.

STABILITY AND COMPATIBILTY

For a motherboard stability is more important than speed. If your system crashes frequently and it is killing your work or entertainment, performance is second. Before starting performance tests we do 2 days of stability testing.

TORTURE TESTS

We use two programs for testing the stability of the board. First I add 4 more add-on cards for the test, and of course an AGP video card.

• Sound Blaster Live Player Sound Card
• Intel 10/100 82559 WOL Ethernet Card
• Zoom 2920 Onboard DSP and Controller Modem
• Lifeview TV Tuner Card
• Cardex GeForce 3 Golden Sample Video Card

And for the IDE and RAID part I added:

• Pioneer 16x DVD Player
• Plextor 16x10x40 CD-Rewriter
• 2 x IBM Deskstar IC35040AVER07

First I looked for a new BIOS, but this was the first release and there were no new BIOS releases on their site. I did striping for RAID controller. I installed XP Professional Edition from scratch and the latest versions of drivers for the cards and connected it to the network.

Then I turned on the TV Tuner, copied some files from the network, and tried to dial from the modem at the same time. There were no problems at all.

Once this worked without problems I started the burn-in tests. The first test was Check-It Pro. It is the industry standard burn-in test for most of the manufacturers. But we saw a problem when detecting the memory. The problem was not the motherboard. I tried several 845D motherboards and saw the same problem. We will contact the software manufacturer for this bug.

For Windows memory and CPU Subsystem burn-in tests I use prime95's Torture test. Because it hits the CPU so hard using calculations sometimes we see 4-5 C degrees of CPU temperature increase. Actually it tries to find Mersenne prime numbers by heavy calculations. Overclocking your CPU or testing your PC for stability using prime95's Torture test is the best way to go. I started the test and let it run for 32 hours.

Then I setup Sysmark 2001 and Patch 3 for continuous testing for 24 hours. If the motherboard is still alive after all that, then it is stable!

For myself I overclocked the CPU step by step. I overclocked it 10%, 15% and 20% and applied another Prime95. This board has a very good overclocking capability. It handled all the stages well.