Friday, April 28, 2000

Introduction

While it's widely known that Intel's 820 chipset was designed from the ground up with Rambus memory in mind, Micro-Star - like many other manufacturers, has opted to implement the chipset in conjunction with less expensive SDRAM. The MS-6301 - arriving fresh from the minds at Micro-Star with its own fair share of interesting features - promises to add another touch of diversity to an already well represented market.

Among the functions in question, in fact, is the D-LED diagnostic panel, which greatly simplifies the identification of hardware mishaps. That said, let's now take a look at the board, and see what we can see.

The features

The MS-6301 is expandable via its 5/1/1 design. Thus we're presented with 5 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, and an AGP port - all ready to accept your favorite cards. In addition, the MS-6301 includes an AMR slot, and 3 168-pin DIMM sockets that can accept a total of 1GB of memory.

As for configuring the MS-6301, though configuration is technically jumperless, there are actually few to look after during installation.

Within the BIOS can be found the "Hardware Monitor Setup" menu, which includes functions that allow users to change the clock multiplier (useful with pre-PIII processors), the bus frequency, and the CPU's core voltage. Unfortunately there is no option for independently adjusting the memory bus frequency. Due to that, it isn't possible to operate the memory at a setting 33MHz higher than the main bus, and thus make use of memory with a 100MHz main bus.

Available clock frequencies include: 100MHz, 105MHz, 114MHz, 120MHz, and 124MHz. A setting of 133MHz is also available, but only by playing with jumper SW1, and with the warning to be certain the processor installed on the board can handle such a bus frequency. Unfortunately, this jumper is located under the CPU, which makes it rather difficult to use when the processor is installed.

Next: Additional features.