Installation

The physical installation can be easily achieved by a newbie. The BIOS offers all the settings you may need but some of them could be dangerous for young people with less knowledge and avid desire to learn :). Seriously after you mount the motherboard in the case you only need to enter the BIOS and make the necessary adjustments. The drivers which need installation are the same 4n1 and the Promise controller drivers (if you use it). Special attention must go to Windows 2000 installation when using the onboard RAID; it is necessary to use the supplied Promise driver disk. I have seen lots of posts on the web with so called Windows 2000 installation problems and that's why I insist on this rather logical matter.

Overclocking

How useful it's a motherboard if it can't be overclocked? Fortunately MSI thought to overclockers when designed this mobo. The BIOS is an Award clone from American Megatrends. It offers powerful tweaks especially in the "Hardware monitor setup" section. You can adjust the multiplier, core and DDR voltage and the FSB frequency up to 164Mhz in 1 Mhz increments. For testing I used the following setup:

I was more than surprised to see that the 800Mhz Duron was able to do a 133Mhz FSB on this motherboard. The 1Ghz Tbird didn't want to go so high but with a multiplier tweak it was able to reach 133FSB (9x133Mhz=1197Mhz). The motherboard was very stable in all our tests.
We have a very overclockable 700Mhz Duron in our lab which is generally used for overclocking and stability tests. With this CPU I was able to reach 142Mhz FSB with voltage tweaks, an absolute record for this CPU. In the last year we noticed that final version motherboards are more and more stable. I remember that last year I was satisfied if a mobo hanged for less than five times in a stability test. Today most motherboards which hang more than three times are considered unstable by PC Hardware. For the next performance tests I used the 686B controller not the RAID stripping configuration which can increase performance.