Intel 845E Motherboard Roundup - August 2002

MSI 845E Max2

The MSI 845E Max2 is yet another feature-packed motherboard among the 845E crowd.

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The 845E Max2 comes with the onboard Promise PDC20276 RAID controller that we've already told you about. As we mentioned before, while the PDC20276 isn't the best RAID controller, it's still better than having no RAID at all onboard.

The Max2 also comes with Intel 82562ET LAN and Realtek ALC650 audio (via ICH4 South Bridge). A more interesting feature of the Max2 is the wireless Bluetooth functionality, which is a nifty feature to have even despite the fact that Bluetooth can hardly compete with higher bandwidth solutions like 802.11b wireless Ethernet. But it's a usable feature nonetheless.

As far as layout is concerned, the Max2 is pretty well designed. We like the addition of the active cooler over the North Bridge, despite how much louder it may make your system. There are also a few tiny passive aluminum heatsinks covering some of the voltage regulators located near the CPU socket to help dissipate heat.

Stressing the 845E Max2

We began our "stressmarking" of the 845E Max2 with Prime95 torture tests for a little over 24 hours on SPD settings. After having passed that easily, the Max2 passed even more Prime95 torture testes with more aggressive timings. Eventually, we filled all 3 memory slots with RAM and watched the Max2 complete our entire suite of benchmarks without tripping. However, upon lowering the timings a bit (2,2,2,5) with all 3 DIMM slots populated, we witnessed a Prime95 torture test fail after about an hour. We were able to successfully run Prime95 torture tests on aggressive timings with all 3 banks taken up for about 3 hours after this first failed attempt however.

The U.S. street price for the MSI 845E Max2 is currently $135 depending on your location.