The announcement of a new high-performance Pentium 4 CPU family based on 0.13-micron Northwood with 512KB L2 cache coincided with the first shipments of Intel's only DDR Pentium 4 chipset, the long-awaited i845D (officially, this chipset is named i845 just like its SDR predecessor, but most mainboard makers call it i845D in order to prevent uncertainties). We have already tested these novelties separately, so you may have a look at the corresponding reviews:

• Intel Pentium 4 (Northwood) 2.0AGHz and 2.2GHz against AMD Athlon XP 2000+
• Intel 845D (i845 B-Step) Chipset Review

Now that i845D based mainboards became available in retail, it's high time to combine these two products and to see how good Pentium 4 (Northwood) CPUs can work on an i845D based mainboard.

The DDR version of i845 was warmly welcomed by the mainboard makers. We can hardly think of a company engaged in mainboard manufacturing that would ignore i845. Shelves in the hardware shops are piled with all sorts of i845D based products, DDR SDRAM sales go up, so does the price of DDR modules. However, for some reasons, which we repeatedly discuss at our web-site, i845D can be considered today's most popular platform for Pentium 4 CPUs. Well, enough for talking about the reasons for i845D instant recognition, let's get down to the main point of this review.

Among the whole bunch of i845D based mainboards at our disposal we chose only one solution for this test session - MSI 845 Ultra-ARU. Of course, below we'll supply a short description of its features. But the very first notice on our part is that nowadays this mainboard has the richest functions set of all the boards of the type. This becomes clear after you cast the first glance at the specs. So, let's take a closer look at this MSI wonder…

Closer Look

MSI 845 Ultra-ARU strongly reminds us of the other boards from MSI 845 series. Here are the specifications:

MSI 845 Ultra-ARU
Supported CPUs	Socket478 Intel Pentium 4 (Willamette/Northwood core)
Chipset	Intel 845D
FSB Frequencies	100-200MHz
Overclocking Friendly Features	Supports CPU Clock Multiplier Setting and Vcore, Vmem and Vagp Adjustment
Memory	3 184-pin DIMM slots for PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM Supports up to 2GB memory No ECC support
Expansion Slots (AGP/PCI/ISA/CNR)	1/5/0/1
USB Ports	4 USB 1.1 ports and 4 USB 2.0 ports
Integrated Graphics	No
Integrated Sound	6-channel controller from C-media - CMI8738
Additional Features	Integrated USB 2.0 controller from NEC Integrated ATA/133 IDE RAID controller from Promise
BIOS	AMI BIOS v1.50
Form-Factor	ATX, 305x230mm

Please, keep in mind that MSI 845 Ultra-ARU is just one member of the 845 Ultra family based on i845. In future, MSI plans to launch two simplified modifications of 845 Ultra-ARU:

• MSI 845 Ultra will have no integrated ATA/133 RAID controller and no integrated USB 2.0 controller;
• MSI 845 Ultra-AR will have no USB 2.0 controller.

The whole 845 Ultra family is built on the same PCB, so everything we'll say about the full-featured MSI 845 Ultra-ARU is true for the other, "lite" models.

The similarity between the 845 Ultra family members can be seen with a naked eye, while the implicit connections between 845 Ultra and 845 Pro mainboards are a lot more exciting. MSI 845 Pro family was based on a PC133 SDRAM version of i845 chipset, but i845 and i845D are just two different revisions (A2 and B0) of the same chipset. So, as the mainboard makers developed the design of the new i845D based boards, they could have borrowed the design from the older mainboards based on i845 with PC133 SDRAM support. In fact, the memory slots were the only thing to change. Our investigation revealed that MSI has really followed this pattern: the design of its 845 Ultra family is based on that of 845 Pro2 mainboard. The developers changed not only the lower right corner of the board, where DDR DIMM slots are located. As a result of MSI's intention to introduce USB 2.0 support, some changes were made on the left side of the PCB too.

Let us now scrutinize the key peculiarities of MSI 845 Ultra-ARU. First of all, we'd like to draw you attention to its RAM subsystem. Intel 845D supports up to 4 banks of PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM totaling 2GB. At the same time, there are three 184-pin slots for DDR SDRAM. Accordingly, modules installed in the second and third DDR DIMM slots face some restrictions: if there is a dual-channel DDR module installed in either of these slots, the other slot is to stay empty.

The BIOS Setup of 845 Ultra-ARU has a special option to adjust the memory bus frequency, "DRAM frequency" which allows setting two values: 200MHz and 266MHz. With 200MHz the system memory works synchronously with the CPU bus. This implies that at the standard 100MHz FSB the memory really works at 200MHz. With 266MHz the FSB-to-memory bus frequency ratio is 3:4. As a result, in this mode (at standard FSB frequency) the memory works at 266MHz. Surely, the memory frequency increases during overclocking together with the FSB frequency. The BIOS also offers a complete range of settings, which allow adjusting the memory timings: : CAS Latency, RAS to CAS Delay, RAS Precharge Delay and Active Precharge Delay. Weird as it might seem, although i845 has no ECC support, still the BIOS Setup includes an option for enabling ECC. Please, don't get confused: 845 Ultra-ARU has no ECC support and will never get it.

MSI is the first manufacturer to integrate USB 2.0 controllers on its mainboards. 845 Ultra-ARU is no exception: it does have a USB 2.0 controller, of course. Many other manufacturers install chips like that on their High-End products. Like ASUS P4B266 (see our ASUS P4B266 Mainboard Review), MSI 845 Ultra-ARU has a small chip from NEC supporting four USB 2.0 ports. This mainboard is shipped with a bracket for the rear side of the PC case. It is installed instead of an expansion card and serves to bring outside four USB 2.0 ports.

By the way, as the USB 2.0 controller is located on the left side of the PCB, MSI 845 Ultra-ARU is deprived of the last PCI slot, so there are only five of them. Frankly speaking, it is no fatal drawback that could make this board not smart enough. It still boasts integrated sound and ATA/133 RAID controller.

In our ASUS P4B266 Review we stressed that so far the USB 2.0 on that board was nothing more but just a marketing trick. But the situation has now altered. Formerly, in Windows 2000 and Windows XP the USB 2.0 ports worked in USB 1.1 mode because there was no USB 2.0 protocol support. Now there is a patch for Windows XP which eliminates this problem. It means that those Windows XP users who have USB 2.0 devices can already enjoy the new bus with 480Mbit/sec bandwidth.

Standard i845 chipset comprises ICH2 South Bridge, which has turned rather outdated. It has no USB 2.0 support forcing the manufacturers to excel in installing external controllers. Worse still, it doesn't support the ATA/133 protocol. Though Intel does not think of ATA/133 support for its upcoming chipsets saying this protocol would yield just a negligibly small performance gain (these assumptions are partially correct), ATA/133 is not that useless. Thanks to the BigDrive technology, this protocol helps to overcome 137GB limit for IDE HDD capacity. Hard disk drives with storage capacity exceeding 137GB can work with ATA/133 controllers only. So far, there exists just one HDD of the kind, D540X-4G from Matrox, but the progress doesn't stand still, does it?

For this reason MSI decided to enhance 845 Ultra-ARU board with an external ATA/133 controller. This is no regular device, but a RAID controller from Promise that supports this up-to-date protocol. Promise PDC20276 chip with two accessory IDE channels connected to it supports up to four HDDs which can be united in RAID arrays level 0 and 1. Sadly, this MSI mainboard does not support RAID 0+1: that's the policy of Promise, which narrows the horizons of its integrated solutions as compared to external IDE RAID PCI controllers. The IDE connectors referring to the RAID controller are located not in the best place, in front of the last PCI slots. In practice IDE cables connected to these connectors appear in the way when you use "long-sized" PCI controllers.

Another integrated controller on MSI 845 Ultra-ARU is a popular PCI sound controller from C-media, the six-channel CMI8738 chip. Like many other manufacturers, MSI preferred a wholesome PCI controller to AC'97 chip, which loads the CPU and provides poorer sound. CMI8738 is a quite descent sound chip supporting 3D audio and digital S/PDIF Out. We were sorry to find no S/PDIF layout on MSI 845 Ultra-ARU, however.

As we remember, MSI used to provide its mainboards with a rather promising PC2PC technology serving to connect two PCs in a local network via a USB cable. Today this technology is forgotten and replaced with SmartKey, a hardware system for unauthorized access protection.

Physically, SmartKey is a small device connected to a USB port. Its heart is a Flash memory chip. When you connect the SmartKey for the first time, it is detected by the BIOS and the user is offered to enable the technology. Further on, the user enters a password and a checksum is generated. The latter is saved in the Flash memory of the mainboard and SmartKey. Every time the PC is turned on, 845 Ultra-ARU compares the checksums in the mainboard and SmartKey Flash memories and boots up only if they coincide. If there is no SmartKey in the USB port, it's impossible to turn on the PC. If the two checksums don't coincide, you can refresh the checksum in SmartKey Flash memory. For this purpose you should enter the password that was used to generate the checksum stored in the mainboard Flash memory. Thus, SmartKey is a far more powerful PC protection system than the commonly used boot-up password enabled in the BIOS Setup. As the data needed for this technology to work are stored not in the CMOS but in the Flash memory, it is not enough to lock Clear CMOS jumper to fool SmartKey. In this case you should take the pain to refresh the Flash memory.

By the by, SmartKey offers a similar protection for Windows as well: the shipping set includes a software set that blocks the operation system if there is no key in the USB port.

MSI 845 Ultra-ARU also features an integrated diagnostics system. Lately, MSI has given up implementing D-LED technologies and offers D-Bracket instead. The difference between these two systems can be described as "D-Bracket is D-LED front view". D-Bracket is actually a bracket installed into the rear panel of the PC case instead of an expansion card with four bi-color LEDs on it. At reboot, these LEDs depict the POST status. If any problems arise, they help to define what has gone wrong. Thus, D-Bracket has the same idea as D-LED. It's just MSI, which fairly supposed that LEDs located outside the PC case are more convenient to watch at. The bracket with LEDs also has two extra USB 1.1 ports on it, so a PC with MSI 845 Ultra-ARU mainboard (standard shipping set) has four USB 1.1 ports and four USB 2.0 ports.

That's about all we could tell you about the peculiarities of MSI 845 Ultra-ARU. There are just a couple of trifles to specify. Firstly, this mainboard can work not only with PSUs with an accessory 12V cable corresponding to ATX 2.03 spec, but also with regular power supply units if they are able to power all components. Secondly, the North Bridge of Intel 485 chipset is covered with a high-quality active cooler. It is supposed to favourably affect the board's stability in both nominal and overclocked modes. Thirdly, this mainboards has a wise and handy design the only drawback in which are the oddly located IDE connectors of the RAID controller.

Overclocking

MSI has always tried to provide its mainboards (MSI 845 Ultra-ARU as well) with an attractive bunch of CPU overclocking functions. Moreover, 845 Ultra-ARU has a number of functions, which make it even more overclocking friendly than any other mainboard from MSI. Before we pass over to describing these functions, we'd like to point out that the CPU on 845 Ultra-ARU is configured via BIOS Setup, where all the overclocking settings are located. As a whole, none of MSI's latest mainboards has any jumpers except Clear CMOS. MSI 845 Ultra-ARU is no exception here, so it is very convenient to overclock the CPU on this board. We'd like to note that if the system cannot reboot after the CPU configuration has been changed, MSI 845 Ultra-ARU restores default settings on the next reboot. That's why you won't have to resort to the Clear CMOS jumper too often. To be short, the CPU overclocking with MSI 845 Ultra-ARU promises to be as convenient as with any ASUS or ABIT board, which are generally acknowledged as the world's leaders in this filed.

Now let us have a look at the settings, which MSI 845 Ultra-ARU can provide to an overclocker:

• FSB frequency adjustment. BIOS Setup allows adjusting the FSB frequency from 100MHz to 200MHz with an increment of 1MHz. In terms of the Pentium 4 family (Quad Pumped Bus) this means that the bus frequency can be increased from the nominal 400MHz to 800MHz.
• CPU multiplier adjustment via BIOS Setup. This function works only for unlocked multipliers, but the trouble is that in all the mass Pentium 4 CPUs it is locked. So, this is a purely virtual function. By the way, MSI 845 Ultra-ARU checks whether the multiplier is locked or not. If it is, this function becomes unavailable.
• BIOS Setup allows Vcore adjustment too. For processors based on Willamette core the Vcore varies within 1.75-1.85V interval with an increment of 0.025V; for Northwood based CPUs it varies from 1.5V to 1.65V with the same increment.
• MSI 845 Ultra-ARU lets increase the Vmem from 2.5V to 2.6V.
• Besides, Vagp can be brought up from 1.5V to 1.6V. We'd like to remind you that 3.3V graphics cards (like Riva TNT, SiS 305, Rage 128 Pro and older ones) don't work with i850 and i845 based mainboards.
• You can also adjust memory timings and the clock the memory as 1:1 and 4:3 of the FSB frequency. These settings let the user choose the fastest and most stable memory working mode.

It's noteworthy that 133MHz FSB is half-standard for MSI 845 Ultra-ARU. That is, the PCI bus divider applied at FSB frequencies exceeding 132MHz is not 1:3 but 1:4. For this reason, setting the FSB frequency to 133MHz doesn't make any of the buses work at over-nominal frequencies together with the CPU bus. Consequently, when Intel launches Pentium 4 CPUs intended for 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, they'll perfectly work on MSI 845 Ultra-ARU.

As you can see, from the theoretical point of view MSI 845 Ultra-ARU is quite suitable for overclockers' needs. Let us now investigate the real state of things.

In order to check how MSI 845 Ultra-ARU feels at higher FSB frequencies, we carried out an experiment aiming to define the highest frequency, at which the board doesn't lose stability. Happily enough, in our testlab we found a Pentium 4 (Willamette) sample with an unlocked multiplier. After we brought it down till 10x, we could no longer take the CPU's overclockability into consideration. So that to squeeze the maximum out of the FSB, we took a DDR333 module from KingMax, which was clocked at FSB frequency. A series of experiments gave the following results:

As our tests proved, any FSB frequency below 200MHz is applicable for MSI 845 Ultra-ARU. We admit that we have never met a Pentium 4 mainboard that would allow increasing the FSB frequency so greatly. Even the recently tested ASUS P4B266 didn't let us go further than 172MHz. It looks like MSI was right to provide the chipset with a quality cooler. Together with almost flawless PCB design and a wise CPU power supply circuit, this gave a brilliant result. In the upshot we can call MSI 845 Ultra-ARU one of the best mainboards for overclocking Pentium 4 CPUs.

Unfortunately, our overclocking experiments are of too little practical value. All the available Pentium 4 CPUs have a locked multiplier, which is an insurmountable obstacle for overclockers, so it is none of the mainboards' fault. In order to check how MSI 845 Ultra-ARU would behave in reality, we tried overclocking a mass Pentium 4 (Northwood) CPU 2.0A GHz on it. The sample was manufactured in Malaysia and featured Sspec SL5YR. As we brought the Vcore to the maximum, we obtained the following results:

Of course, a gain of 20% is not that great. Nevertheless, we failed to get even this result as we overclocked a similar CPU on ABIT TH7II board. This is another piece of evidence saying MSI 845 Ultra-ARU is an overclocker-friendly mainboard.

Testbed and Methods

One of our aims was to show how processors with Northwood die work on mainboards based on i845D chipset. So, first of all we decided to compare the performance of Willamette and Northwood CPUs working at the same frequency on different platforms: i850 with RDRAM and i845 with PC2100 DDR SDRAM. Theoretically, the enlarged L2 cache of Northwood based CPUs was to make up for lower PC2100 DDR SDRAM bandwidth used on i845D based mainboards. We mean that the performance difference shown by Northwood CPUs working on different platforms was expected to be smaller than the performance difference of Willamette processors tested in the same conditions. We'll show you a bit later what came out of this.

First let us have a look at the testbeds we used during this test session:

All the tests were run in Windows XP.

Performance

The results obtained in SYSmark2001 show that the performances of Northwood and Willamette CPUs in typical applications are equal on the RDRAM platform and on DDR SDRAM platform. In both cases i845D is about 2% slower than i850.

In content creation applications the larger L2 cache of Pentium 4 (Northwood) CPUs gives a stronger effect than in the previous case. In these applications the migration from Willamette to Northwood (clock frequency remaining the same) results in a 5% performance gain. This is true for both platforms.

It is interesting that in business applications working with modest amounts of data the larger L2 cache of the Northwood CPU grades down the performance gap between i845D and i850. In case Willamette is used, it is a 3-point difference; in case of Northwood it is only 1 point.

A similar picture was observed when we checked the systems' abilities to encode MPEG2 video stream into MPEG4. Here i845D with DDR SDRAM (2.1GB/sec bandwidth) shows about the same performance as i850 working with a dual-channel RDRAM (3.2GB/sec bandwidth).

Tests in 3Dmark2001 reveal a 6% performance difference between the two Pentium 4 cores regardless of the chipset used. However, i845D proves to be 1-2% slower than i850.

A 6% performance gain is possible to obtain using Northwood core in Quake3. Once again, we can make sure that the CPU produces no influence upon the results lineup of the two Intel chipsets.

As we tested in the frequently used 1280x1024x32 resolution, the systems turned out to be close in performance no matter which CPU or chipset in involved. In this case it is the graphics card that matters.

Only at the diagram with Unreal Tournament results we finally saw what we had expected so long. The ultimate performance of systems built on CPUs with a larger cache tends to be less dependent on the memory bus bandwidth.

Conclusion

According to what our tests showed, MSI 845 Ultra-ARU has two issues to boast: it is a full-featured mainboard with an enormous CPU overclocking potential. We guess, these two qualities are quite enough for anyone looking for a DDR Pentium 4 mainboard to pay keen attention to this solution.

Highs:

• Excellent stability in both nominal and overclocked modes;
• Rich bunch of overclocking-friendly functions;
• Perfect efficiency at 133MHz FSB;
• New technologies and protocols support; USB 2.0 and ATA/133;
• Stylish outlook.

Lows:

• Insignificant drawbacks in PCB design.

As far as Northwood performance with i845D goes, it was found 5% lower than with i850. That is, the performance increase resulting from the migration to a new CPU die with an enlarged L2 cache appeared the same for RDRAM and DDR SDRAM chipsets.