msi ms-6524 -p4
Approx Price: $75USD	MFG: Link MSI MS-6524 Northbridge SiS 650 Southbridge SiS 961 Supported FSB 100 MHz Form Factor Micro ATX DIMM Slots Two PC100/PC133 Max Memory 2 GB Integrated video Yes, SiS650 Shared Video memory 8MB IDE 2 Ultra/100 AGP 4x AGP PCI 3 32bit PCI's ISA None CNR/AMR/ACR 1 CNR LAN 10/100 Realtek 8100L Audio Realtek ALC201A AC'97 USB 2 USB 1.1 Power Supply Pentium 4 Misc 2 Serial, 1 Parallel, WoL, WoM

The MSI 6524 is almost exactly the same in terms of layout as the MSI 6533 motherboard; both are based on the SiS 650 chipset. The difference lies in the fact that the MSI 6524 uses SDRAM rather then DDR.

There are also no heatsinks on the MOSFET's to keep them cool and during testing they did get hot to the touch - the system remained stable however. Actually the 6524 was more stable then the 6533, it didn't crash once during testing.

The small passive chipset heatsink on the SiS650 got very warm during our testing, it would have been nice to see some sort of active cooling on top of it. We understand that this is a low cost motherboard, but we also would have liked to see the accompanying Serial and USB brackets so we could take advantage of the headers.

Of course being the only Pentium 4 board based on SDRAM it also has slightly slower performance as well. The upswing to this is that SDRAM is readily available in most existing computers, and for a very low cost. It's also interesting to see that the 6524 was more stable then the 6533, the 6524 didn't crash once during testing.