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MSI 850 Pro5 Pentium 4 Motherboard Review
MSI 850 Pro5 Pentium 4 Motherboard Review - PCSTATS
The MSI 850 Pro5 uses the i850 chipset and has support for Socket478 Pentium 4's running on a 100 MHz FSB.
 84% Rating:   
Filed under: Motherboards Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: MSI May 18 2002   C. Sun  
Home > Reviews > Motherboards > MSI 850 Pro5

Benchmarks; QIII Arena & Conclusions

Quake III Arena

Source: ID Software

Quake III Arena is a First Person Shooter (FPS) that revolutionized gaming as we know it. Using multiple light sources and having graphics textures that can fill videocards, even after 3 years it's still able to bring a cutting edge system to its knees.

Quake III Arena Fastest demo001
Motherboard FPS Ranking
1.

850 Pro5 - 100 MHz FSB

271.6
2.

850 Pro5 - 112 MHz FSB

301.7

Quake III Arena Fastest nv15demo
Motherboard FPS Ranking
1.

850 Pro5 - 100 MHz FSB

74.2
2.

850 Pro5 - 112 MHz FSB

82.1

Quake III Arena has always loved the memory bandwidth a P4/RDRAM has and here the 850 Pro5 does very well. With a slight overclock we are able to crack 300 fps in demo001! Let's see how the system handles 1024x768...

Quake III Arena MAX 1024x768 demo001
Motherboard FPS Ranking
1.

850 Pro5 - 100 MHz FSB

216.5
2.

850 Pro5 - 112 MHz FSB

234.7

Quake III Arena MAX 1024x768 nv15demo
Motherboard FPS Ranking
1.

850 Pro5 - 100 MHz FSB

51.1
2.

850 Pro5 - 112 MHz FSB

57.1

Here at 1024x768 the differences stay about the same. Pure Quake III gaming bliss.

Conclusion:

The MSI 850 Pro5 is a great motherboard; stability was excellent during testing. As we can see from the benchmarks the performance of the board is very good to say the least - it passed all our tests with flying colours.

Even though there are not as many tweaks for the overclocker to play with, the 850 Pro5 should be able to satisfy almost any performance user since it offers quite a bit of overclocking options. Best of all the price is right; retailing for only $175 CDN, it's easily one of the most affordable RDRAM-based Pentium 4 motherboards out there.

Of course with everything good, there comes the bad. The biggest negative is the limit to just four PCI expansion slots. That is not much for a motherboard which may be replacing one with five or six slots. It would have been nice to have the power connectors grouped together, but that is more of a passing comment than anything else. It is obviously more important for the engineers to get a good clean layout than centralize small things like power connector placements. USB 2.0 would have been a great option to future proof this motherboard, but since it has been out for a while now it was no doubt a little premature at the time of its initial release.

IDE RAID is a bit of a shocker. It is hard to imagine why RAID would have been omitted from a Pentium 4 board at this stage of the game.

Overall, we were very happy with the MSI 850 Pro5, it's a very powerful Pentium 4 motherboard that can handle all your office and gaming needs. Should you turn to the dark side and try your hand at overclocking, the 850 Pro5 can handle that with grace and speed as well. That is what I really like to see :)

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4. Epox 4B2A i845 P4 Motherboard
5. Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz Review

< Previous Page © 2023 PCSTATS.com Motherboards Reviews...»

 

Contents of Article: MSI 850 Pro5
 Pg 1.  MSI 850 Pro5 Pentium 4 Motherboard Review
 Pg 2.  Scouting around the motherboard
 Pg 3.  MSI 850 Pro5 BIOS Features
 Pg 4.  Test System & Benchmarks
 Pg 5.  Benchmarks; Bapco Sysmark 2002, Winstone
 Pg 6.  Benchmarks; Winbench 99, Sandra
 Pg 7.  Benchmarks; PCmark 2002, 3Dmark 2001
 Pg 8.  — Benchmarks; QIII Arena & Conclusions

 
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