Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Introduction

The Matsonic MS-9068E is the latest motherboard from the German manufacturer that many Europeans know and respect. It is a Micro ATX form-factor board that comes with a complete collection of integrated components.

Like many other boards in its category, the MS-9068E includes a variety of legacy ports -- PS/2, serial, parallel -- as well as support for USB 1.1 and USB 2.0.

Among its more traditional components, it can also boast of an integrated Realtek TRL8100B 10/100Base-T Ethernet controller, an AC'97 sound-card without forgetting the 82845G graphic processor integrated into the chipset of course.

Configuration

The Matsonic MS-9068E's design isn't exactly jumperless, but that won't hinder most users from quickly installing it. Those jumpers that are present are responsible for the following functions: setting the CPU voltage to between 1.1V and 1.85V in 0.25V increments, clearing the CMOS, setting the LAN controller, and protecting the BIOS.

Once within the BIOS, users will be able to adjust most memory and CPU settings from within the "Frequency/Voltage Control" menu.

The most prominent option is to set the FSB frequency to between 100MHz and 200MHz in 2MHz increments.

Unfortunately, the MS-9068E does not support DDR333 memory, which is why we'll be testing it with DDR266 DDR-SDRAM.

Next: Technical details

Matsonic MS9068E