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MSI 648-MAX Review

Want to have your Pentium 4 riding the 333MHz bus instead of the short bus. MSI and SiS step up to the plate and deliver the 648MAX sporting AGP8X.

Introduction:

MSI has been in the business for over 15yrs and is one of the top mainboard manufacturers in the world. Most of you will also recognize MSI as a leading video card manufacturer that has been putting out top shelf NVIDIA based graphics cards for the last few years. Our review today will be focusing on the mainboard side of things, specifically, the new MSI 648 MAX motherboard based on the SiS648. There are two versions of this board currently available, the 648 MAX-F and the 648 MAX-L. The difference between the boards is the type of network controller used on the board. Standard 10/100 boards are designated with the "L" branding, while the Gigabit 10/100/1000 board we tested here today is the "F" version.

The SiS648 brings a host of features like the new 8X AGP 3.0 and DDR333 with unofficial DDR400 support. The SiS648 is capable of double the 533MB of bandwidth of older SiS chipsets thanks to the new SiS MuTIOL 1G® proprietary interconnect responsible for running a whopping 1GB/s bandwidth between the SiS648 and SiS963.

At the south end of the MuTIOL 1G® proprietary interconnect, the SiS963 is sporting a great feature set that includes AC’97 audio support and a 3-port IEEE-1394 (Firewire) controller. There's also dual ATA/133 IDE controllers and support for up to 6 USB 2.0 ports.

From SiS:

SiS648 HMAC The SiS648 Host & Memory & AGP Controller integrates a high performance host interface for Intel Pentium® 4 processor, a high performance memory controller, The AGP interface can support external AGP slot with AGP 4X/8X capability and Fast Write Transactions, dnd SiS MuTIOL 1G® Technology connecting w/ SiS963 MuTIOL 1G® Media IO. The SiS648 Host Interface features the AGTL & AGTL+ compliant bus driver technology with integrated on-die termination to support Intel Pentium® 4 series processors with FSB 400MHz/533MHz. It provides a 12-level In-Order-Queue to support maximum outstanding transactions on host bus up to 12. The host interface plays the role of processor transactions' dispatcher. It dispatches transactions to Memory, I/O interface and AGP bus. Transactions to different destinations can be dispatched concurrently in order to maximum pipeline efficiency. In addition to dispatching processor's transactions to corresponding destinations, host interface also forward DMA transactions from AGP masters and I/O masters to host bus for snooping, including master interrupt delivery. The memory controller supports DDR only. It can offer bandwidth up to 2.7GB/s under DDR333 in order to sustain the bandwidth demand from host processor, as well as the multi I/O masters and AGP masters. The Memory Controller mainly comprises the Memory Arbiter, the M-data/M-Command Queues, and the Memory Interface.

Features:

The Board Layout:

The 648 MAX actually has a very good layout. The fire engine red PCB has become somewhat of a calling card for MSI products. There are a handful of interesting features on the 648 MAX that we will point out as we go along.

The components in the area around the CPU are laid out well. There is a decent amount of space between the socket and the three DDR DIMM slots making it fairly easy to reach the three pin fan header when removing or replacing your HSF. The backside of the CPU socket area does have a small row of four evenly spaced capacitors that pose no clearance issues.

While we are hot on the topic of DDR slot placement, let’s take a look at the DDR DIMM slots. As we mentioned already, the area between the CPU socket area and the DIMM slots is clutter free, making it easy to work in and around the area a breeze. The age old clearance issue with the DIMM slots and the AGP slot is still present, although not as bad on the 648 MAX.

There are only two fan headers on this board, certainly I would have liked to seen at least one more. This isn’t a major issue since most people know that power sucking fans are better off run directly from the system power supply via 3 pin adapters.