Price: $140 Street

Availability: Now

Over the past year or so, the Intel motherboard chipset options have been very cut and dried. If you wanted the absolute top performance with a 100MHz FSB or when overclocked, the Intel BX has been the obvious choice. Since the BX simply does not have the rich feature set many desire with their new PCs, the VIA Apollo Pro 133/133A made hay in the absence of a viable Intel alternative. The Intel 810 and 810E chipsets had all the necessary features, but their lack of a dedicated AGP slot negated their use for all but the value and business PC markets. Intel's performance chipset, the i820, supports expensive RDRAM by default, thus increasing the overall cost of using that type of motherboard. To combat this, Intel developed an i820 SDRAM translator hub, but due to stability issues, these motherboards have since been recalled at great expense. With the release of the Intel 815 and 815E chipsets, everyone from the buying public to the motherboard vendors are hoping that Intel has finally released a motherboard solution that incorporates the best of all worlds.

Micro-Star is certainly one of the up and coming motherboard vendors, and they have evolved from a relatively small company with a limited product line-up to being one of the premier motherboard producers in the world. MSI has made the jump by producing high quality motherboards with the performance and features that we demand. They have also rapidly extended their product line into virtually every chipset available, and with their Dual-CPU MS-694D Pro, made a few innovative products along the way.

The breadth of the market penetration is evident by their motherboard selection, with multiple products even among the same chipsets. For example, MSI currently has four boards using the Intel BX and Apollo Pro 133A chipsets, and three more using the new KT133 chipset. This allows MSI to target specific areas with their motherboards, be it the value, performance or business markets. It certainly does not take MSI long to adopt a new chipset, as is evidenced by their rapid adoption of both the Intel 815 and 815E chipsets.

Since the Intel 815E is a relatively new chipset, the MSI 815E Pro motherboard is a very standard product, sticking very close to the basic reference design. Although the physical board is pretty standard, MSI has included several enhancements that will be of interest to both overclocking and performance aficionados.