Friday, December 14, 2001

Introduction

Despite the similarity in names, the Micro-Star 845 Pro has very little in common with the MSI 845 Pro 2. In fact, their respective circuits couldn't differ more, and still have the same chipset in common. While the 845 Pro 2 is a Socket 478 device, the 845 Pro is a first-generation Socket 423 board. In fact, the 845 Pro is pretty spartan compared to the 845 Pro 2, as the latter comes with many of the same features, and adds to them integrated RAID, and audio controllers.

Without further ado though, lets say we take a closer look, and see what the 845 Pro really has to offer.

Configuration

Configuration of the 845 Pro is an entirely jumperless affair; not a single on-board jumper relates to the configuration of the CPU.

Most configuration settings can be found within the "Hardware Monitor Setup" menu within the BIOS, which may be a bit of a departure for many experienced users.

Within that menu, the first feature that jumps out is the ability to modify the clock multiplier. That said, it's not of much use these days, as most Intel processors include a multiplier lock that prevents the multiplier value from being modified.

Next up, and as expected, users will find an option for altering the FSB operating frequency, followed by the ability to vary the Vcore voltage (as indicated by the table above), and a function permitting users to set the memory bus frequency to either 100MHz, or 133MHz.

Finally, last but not least, a number of memory-timing options can also be tweaked through the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu.

Next: Technical details