MSI 694D Pro-A / MS-Star Force 815

Okay now, a lot of you may be disappointed, but I am WAY behind on hardware reviews, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone on this one. First up, the MSI 694D Pro-A. There are three different versions of this motherboard, the Pro, the Pro-A, and the Pro-AR. We will get into more detail regarding the differences a little later, but for our tests, we will be looking at the Pro-A.

When MSI sent me the box containing the 694D, I was happy to see that they included something else as well. A bit of a bonus you might say, which brings us to the second part of the review... The GeForce2 GTS based MS-Star Force 815. With the rush of mainboard manufacturers jumping in to the video card arena, we are faced with more choices than ever when choosing a video card. Is MSI's entry in the GTS fray worth a look? We shall see.

On to the review(s)!

The Motherboard

Now, I have a bit of history with the 694D that I need to explain. I received my first 694D not long after the board was released. The good people over at theChipMerchant were very kind and sent me a board from the first batch that they received. Upon first look, I was very impressed to say the least. The board's layout was nice and it's list of features was great. Unfortunately, I came to find the board a bit quirky, almost to the point of being unusable. A quick perusal of our own forums showed that I was not the only dissatisfied customer. In fact, it seemed that almost everyone who laid their hands on this motherboard was having a problem of some sort. It was not very encouraging.

Upon emailing MSI's tech-support, a few forum dwellers and I came to find out that we were the unlucky recipients of a batch of "engineering sample" boards. OY! No wonder we were having all sorts of problems! Luckily for me, MSI quickly contacted me when they heard my plight and asked if I would like a new board (final release) to try instead of the one I had. Of course I said "Yes!"

The two boards I got were both 694D Pro-A's. By this I mean that they both had the onboard ATA100 controller from Promise Technology. The two boards though, were very different. My original board was of the (now) infamous orange PCB / *267 Promise chip variety, while the second board had a green PCB and a *265 Promise chip. Honestly, I must say that if I had stopped with the first board, this review would not be very flattering. Fortunately, when the second board arrived, I was ready for it. Let's look at the specs:

In addition to that list, MSI adds a few more gems including voltage tweaks for CPU1 and CPU2 (independently) and FSB speed adjustments. The only difference between the three versions of the 694D is the flavor and quantity of the IDE controller(s). The "Pro" comes with the standard dual channel ATA66 controller supplied by the VIA chipset, the "Pro-A" adds an Ultra100 ATA100 controller from Promise, and finally, the "Pro-AR" adds IDE RAID via an integrated Promise FastTrak100 controller. There is a fourth version of the board that adds firewire capability to the 694D, but it is not/will not be offered for sale in the US anytime soon. This is really unfortunate too, as I am sure a lot of you would appreciate the option of built-in firewire.

Setup / Layout:

Setup with my first board was relatively easy, and everything was pretty straight forward. The only problem I ran into was with my GOrbs and the powersupply connector. It was a tight fit but I did find that if I put the Orb on first, the powersupply connector went in pretty easily. Those of you with heatsinks on the larger end of the scale should be careful though.

Other than the (possible) heatsink issue, I found the board to laid out very well. There were no concerns while installing it in my generic full-tower case as there was plenty of room for everything. As with all dual boards, the 694D is larger than a standard ATX motherboard, so if you prefer using a smaller mid-tower, check your measurements first.

Although a lot of you might shudder at the thought of having any of your components built-in to the motherboard, I found the integrated Promise controller and AC97 audio refreshing. It also allows more future expansion capabilities by freeing up your PCI slots.

As I mentioned before, I was one of the (un)lucky recipients of the infamous orange PCB'd sample boards. With all the trouble I was having and all the problems our forum goers were having, I made sure I was ready when the final (green PCB) board arrived. Armed with the latest drivers for all peripherals, the latest VIA 4-in-1's, and MSI's latest BIOS (1.5b3), I eagerly waited for the motherboard. When the second 694D-A finally arrived, I was really impressed with the way the system went together. I honestly had no problems whatsoever. How did I do it? Well, in a nutshell, I just assembled the system, flashed the BIOS, did my normal BIOS tweaking, installed Win2k, installed the latest 4-in-1's, I then just loaded up my drivers and away I went. Simple as that!

As far as overclocking is concerned, I didn't get too extreme, but I did play around with it on the second 694D. My cB0 PIII 600E's (from the ChipMerchant) ran Win2k just fine at 800 each but crashed when running anything too intensive (Q3, RC5, etc) at default voltage. Fortunately, MSI fixed the voltage settings in the BIOS, so I was able to give my CPU's the extra uNF of .05v that they needed to become completely stable. I did gradually take the 600E's up to 147mhz FSB, but they wouldn't run reliably with any amount of voltage. For all the tests in this review, the system was clocked at 800x2 (133mhz FSB x 6).

There are a few catches to overclocking this board as well. The bus settings look great on paper, but in practice, they aren't quite what they seem. If you have a 100mhz FSB PIII, your maximum FSB setting in the BIOS will be 114mhz. Now there is a way to get around this, but it's a bit of a trick. If you pull the jumper off of SW2, the 694D will automatically set the FSB to 133mhz (for a 100mhz PIII) which sounds great... If your PIII can handle the 133mhz FSB. If not, it's back to 114 for you! If your PIII's can handle the 133mhz FSB, but not at default voltage, there may be some hope. Some of our forum goers have noted some success with booting the system at default speed (100mhz) and upping the voltage in the BIOS, then powering off, removing the SW2 jumper and booting again at 133mhz FSB while holding the voltage settings. I haven't tried this personally, but it's worth a shot. If you have PIII's that default to the 133mhz FSB, you're golden. Once you get to the elusive 133mhz FSB, the bus speed options open up all the way to 200mhz! Have fun with that!

I just wanted to make a quick note that I did try this board with two different USB mice and both seemed to work fine. I used the latest BIOS, VIA 4-in-1's and VIA USB filter drivers. The Razer Boomslang 1000 and Logitech Mouseman+ (both USB) worked fine with their respective latest drivers. As an additional note, niether one improved my Q3 game ;-)

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