Hi! As a newbie (well, I used to have a MSI 6178 but it is not counted) MSI owner I would welcome all the hints for this one. I just bought a second-hand MSI 845 Ultra-ARU (6 months in use after RMAing the original one) via the local internet auction and started wondering what I actually have gotten. I have a few questions, thanks for the anwers in advance! You can answer in my email or in the newsgroup. 1. Processor. Officially the mobo supports only FSB400 Celerons and P4's but how about unofficially? There are hints in MSI home pages that the 533 Northwoods could be run, are there any known glitches (good/bad core steppings etc.)? Just goto bios and set the FSB to 133 (it being quad-pumped=533) and that's it... or is it? What do the PCI and AGP think about 133FSB, some sources say that they are overclocked and won't probably run too good, some say that for FSB133 they are in specs in this mobo (for FSBs >132 different divider used). Which processor would you guys use? Celerons are cheap but are they good for anything? This one leads to the next question... 2. Memory. 200 and 266 DDR is recommended and officially supported, but the prices being what they are, I would probably go for (at least) 333 DDR. The previous question also suggests that maybe I should have faster than 266 memory if I intend to use a FSB533 processor. How about DDR400 or even faster, have they been tried and if so, how do they run? How about bios settings for memory, IIRC for FSB400 (actually 100) the DDR200 will run in FSB (x2 for DDR) speed and DDR266 will run in 4/3 x FSB (x 2 for DDR). Now, based on this, if I throw in some DDR333 and set the memory setting to DDR266, it would give me 4/3 x 133 x 2 = 354MHz... and for bios setting DDR200 I'd get 133 x 2 = 266MHz. How does DDR overclock, I have only fiddled with single speed RAM this far? 3. Having not seen the mobo yet, how about the integrated 5.1 sound system? What do I need, just 6 loudspeakers and a bunch of drivers and that's it or what? 4. I have been thinking of a P4 or Celeron of appr. 2G, is a Radeon 8500 enough? I know it's an oldie, but I cannot spend more. I got one lying around somewhere. 5. Differencs between this one and other i845D mobos of MSI. Can I burn in another board's bios to make this board to appear something else and if so, why would I want to do that? Anything like support for FSB 533 available? There are a couple of MSI boards that use the same chipset (well other boards than the siblings 845 Ultra Pure and 845 Ultra AR) and for what I have understood the differences are minimal. 6. The most important last: is this mobo any good? :-) -gt
