Motherboard: MSI 845G Max-L :: Performance

Stability & Compatibility

You can review our stability/compatibility testing methods here.

Test System

• MSI MAX-L Motherboard
• Intel Pentium 4 2000 CPU (Northwood core)
• 256MB DDR333 PC2700 Crucial DDR memory
• Base System specs

Overclocking was semi-successful and what I mean by this is the board was stable @ a 110MHz FSB but not @ 115MHz. And after the FSB was set to anything over 143MHz using this CPU the system became unstable. This caused the board to lose five points in the overall scoring, as a fifteen percent overclocking increase is what makes the grade and wins the points in our tests.

Performance

This was one of the fastest P4 motherboards to come across my desk, but in real time the board comes pre-overclocked from the factory, as the default CPU speed was 2038MHz a slight bit faster than the average 2.0GHz default speed that is found on most boards.

Because of the nature of the board and our own continuing comparison chart we ran the board in three different ways. As you can see the motherboard is actually a performance savvy product and goes in a different direction of most MSI boards as it is fast right out of the box with no tweaking being necessary.

Tests run at our default scoring system at 2.0GHz

SYSMark 2001 - 203

3DMark 2001 - 7434

SPECviewperf

Quake III - 170

Spec and Quake Results using on-board video

SPECviewperf

Quake III - 18.8

Tests run with the latest software and drivers

SYSMark 2002 - 205

3DMark SE - 7699

SPECviewperf 7.0

Quake III - 169.4

Tests run at 2.5GHz @ 133MHz FSB

SYSMark 2001 - 244

3DMark 2001 - 7903

SPECviewperf

Quake III - 179.5

Spec and Quake Results using on-board video

SPECviewperf

Quake III - 18.8