Msi K735 review

[sad]

Review up!
Linky

Eh, I'm a bit mixed.

If it's reasonably priced, like i'm sure it will (<$99) I'm all for it.

 

[kmmatney]

NewEgg has the ECS SIS735 board for $65, which is an amazing deal. From what I can tell, the ECS board takes both DDR and SDR RAM (not at once), so if you have lots of SDRAM (like me), you can hang onto to it a little longer.

 

[hoe4damoney]

Im amazed that MSI came out with a 735 based chipset without 1mhz FSB increments. Do you know if that can be changed in a bios revision?

Grrrrrr MSI I thought better of you.

Does anyone know when/if ABIT / IWILL are releasing their boards?

 

[Insane3D]

Another thing that I noticed and found slightly amusing. The ECS boards are considered &quot;cheap&quot;, but they use the nicer tri-phase power supply on their board, while the MSI uses the cheaper bi-phase design and they stick a big ole' heatsink on the MOSFET's. I would still buy the ECS even though it does not have mulitplier or voltage adjustment.

 

[Zap]

Another plus for ECS, just for non-overclockers, is that it outperforms other motherboards when running the CPU at default speeds. I was going to get one, but with the difficulty in finding one in stock, plus the fact that I have a 1.2 AXIA that is known stable to over 1.4GHz... I'm getting a Shuttle AK31 for about $25 more.

 

[hoe4damoney]

Im surprised that so many people prefer the ECS board. Sure it has an integrated lan connection and allows you to re-use your sdram but isnt the whole point of buying a ddr system getting better performance in memory bandwith hungry games and apps? Perhaps most of the performance junkies have allready purchased 760 chipset mobos?

 

[sad]

Here's an interesting tidbit from the main dude@[url="http://forum.ocworkbench.com/ocwbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&amp;f=21&amp;t=000030"]www.ocworkbench.com[/url]


<< If you noticed, the board used is rev 1.0 and not rev 1.0A (which is the mass production copy). >>



So maybe the production board will perform better? Still, I'm pretty much sold on this board if I can get my mits on it in the next ~2 weeks. If not, it's 8K7A for me.

 

[StormRider]

The performance difference between most motherboards seem so miniscule these days that I will choose a motherboard based on stability and features and right now I would probably pick the ECS version over the MSI version because of 2 factors:

1) The ECS has a cool built-in NIC that saves a PCI slot.

2) The placement of the AMR connector is not shared with a PCI slot on the ECS as it is on the MSI board -- again saving another PCI slot if you want to use the AMR connector.

 

[BlvdKing]

I am going with ECS as well. It's going to be alot cheaper and I have heard it's easy to set up.