Msi Tv Tuner

We first took a look at ATI's new Radeon Xpress 200 motherboard chipset for Athlon 64 processors late last year. We compared it with one of our favorite boards of the time, the ASUS A8V Deluxe, and came away impressed by its performance, reliability, and feature set. Time has passed, and as these boards based on the RS480 chipset start to hit the market, we're compelled to compare them against more recent offerings.

MSI's microATX RS480M2-IL is not really targeted at hard-core enthusiasts. Though it has a fair number of enthusiast features like SATA RAID, support for the latest AMD processors, and a PCIe x16 graphics slot, it's missing a lot of the features power-users would appreciate such as overclocking options and gigabit Ethernet. This is really a board aimed at anyone building small, quiet PCs to use as basic web/email/word processing machines, or perhaps Windows Media Center Edition boxes. Continued... <!--

PIC: RS480M2.jpg TITLE: MSI RS480M2-IL CAPTION: A micro-ATX board for Media Center machines &#150; MSI's RS480M2-IL. -->

Since this is a microATX board, it doesn't have a plethora of slots. The general board layout is pretty much standard issue, with an x16 PCIe graphics slot followed by three PCI slots. We'd prefer to see an x1 PCIe slot in place of one of the PCI slots, but the configuration MSI gives us is standard. There's plenty of room for a double-wide graphics card without crowding into anything else. <!--

Looking at the rest of the board, you'll find a row of SATA connectors at the front edge and four RAM slots in the usual place. Parallel ATA and floppy drive connectors are in the usual location at the top/front edge, too. The RS480 northbridge chip, with integrated graphics, is passively cooled by a large heat sink with no fan. If you use a quiet CPU cooler, and no graphics card, this has the potential to be the backbone of a very quiet system. Though this heat sink sticks up quite a bit, it doesn't get in the way of the CPU socket&#8212;we had no problems attaching or removing the large Athlon 64 FX-55 stock cooler. <!--

PIC: RS480M2 layout.jpg TITLE: More board layout CAPTION: Everything is laid out well, with no parts getting in the way of any others. -->

The board's backplane has the usual PS/2 keyboard and mouse plugs, a parallel port, four USB 2.0 jacks, one FireWire jack, and 10/100 Ethernet. You'll also notice outputs for the on-board video: VGA, S-Video, and Composite. It's obvious they're thinking about users hooking this up to a TV. Having said that, where's our component output option? Three audio jacks provide basic audio input and output, and an S/PDIF plug to route digital audio to your home theater receiver. Continued...

Since this is not in any way a hard-core motherboard for enthusiasts, there are precious few tweaking options in the BIOS. You cannot adjust the CPU's external frequency (FSB) or multiplier, and there are no real voltage options.

Since the integrated video is a big part of this board, there are several tweaking options in the BIOS to play with: adjusting the amount of main-system RAM that the graphics processor will have access to, forcing TV and monitor modes, running in clock-synchronous or asynchronous mode, and so on. We disabled the integrated video in our testing, since we were using discrete graphics. <!--

PIC: RS480M2 BIOS.jpg TITLE: BIOS video options CAPTION: You've got plenty of options for tweaking the integrated graphics core. -->

There aren't many utilities bundled with the board, but we do like MSI's online update tool that searches its website for BIOS, driver, and utility updates. Still, we can't really talk about motherboard features without bringing up SurroundView, ATI's nifty technology that lets you hook up one display with the motherboard's integrated graphics and two more with an ATI graphics card. It's pretty slick to be able to drive three monitors this way, though we think the displays' management control panels need some additional polish. Continued...

This is a board aimed for basic work computers and even Media Center PCs. Since it's not for enthusiasts, we can't really expect it to perform quite on the same level as the best enthusiast boards. Still, you should know how it stacks up. We tested with the following configuration:

CPU: Athlon 64 FX-55 (check prices) Motherboard: MSI RS480M2-IL (check prices) Memory: 1GB 400MHz DDR RAM (latency: 2-2-2-5) (check prices) Graphics: GeForce 6800GT (check prices) Audio: Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (check prices) Hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 160GB (check prices) Optical drive: ASUS DVD/RW (check prices) Operating system: Windows XP Pro w/SP2 (check prices) DirectX version: 9.0c

If you want to get an idea of how the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset's integrated graphics performs, you should check out our earlier preview's graphics benchmarks. Like all integrated graphics, it runs very slow on today's high-end games, so you'll have to turn down the details and resolution to make these games playable. On the other hand, it has great media capabilities and far better game compatibility than other integrated graphics solutions. If you really want to play games, you're best off still buying an inexpensive graphics card. For "free" graphics, it's not half bad, and a big step up from Intel's GMA 900 integrated graphics. What's more, it's just about the only halfway-decent integrated graphics for Athlon 64 CPUs. Continued...

Let's start off with a look at the synthetic PCMark04 benchmark. It tends to focus more on CPU and memory access speed than on the entire platform, but it can still reveal some useful information about a motherboard's performance.

It looks like the Radeon Xpress 200, or at least MSI's implementation of it, doesn't quite perform as well as a fast nForce 4 Ultra board. Let's look at some other tests and see if the performance difference holds up.

The CPU tests from 3DMark05 run the first and third game tests using the CPU to perform all vertex operations. The difference between our high-end enthusiast nForce 4 Ultra board and MSI's Radeon Xpress 200 are even more pronounced here.

SPECviewperf 8.01 runs through a set of workstation-class visualization and 3D content creation tasks. Performance depends a lot on your video card and its drivers, but CPU and platform speed factor in, too. The difference in performance grows even a little wider with this test. That's quite a significant difference, and it was enough to make us go back and double-check all our settings to make sure something wasn't configured wrong. <!--

GRAPH: games-->

It looks like in both Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004, MSI's board costs you some performance relative to a good enthusiast motherboard. Continued...

It's a little disheartening to see the Radeon Xpress 200 turn in such relatively low benchmark scores after such a strong initial impression when we previewed the chipset late last year. We can't put the blame entirely on ATI; it may be that MSI's implementation isn't as good as it could be, and isn't yet optimized to its fullest. Enthusiast boards using the chipset should be available in another couple months, and at that time we'll have a better idea how they perform for the performance-pushing elite.

This is not really a board for hard-core enthusiasts. It's a microATX board with a passively cooled integrated graphics core capable of playing the occasional game (albeit with reduced settings) and handling video chores. If you're building a small, quiet desktop computer for a work environment or to put in the kid's room, this is an excellent choice. It's also good news for those trying to build cool and quiet Media Center computers, as the integrated graphics is fully compatible with Windows MCE and delivers nice video quality. Just pop in a TV tuner card and a modest CPU with a quiet cooler and you're good to go. The integrated graphics is definitely capable enough to handle hi-def video (from an HD Wonder or similar card) and standard desktop duties&#8212;it's just a bit too weak for a decent 3D gaming experience.

See more of our recent motherboard reviews here.

As good as we think it is for its intended purpose, we'd like to see some improvements to the design. Gigabit Ethernet should be in there, and MSI could lose a PCI slot in favor of a PCIe x1 slot. SATA-II would not be a great addition, as well. Still, when all is said and done, this is a sub-$100 board that, in some applications, can save you the cost of a video card. It doesn't tear up the benchmarks by any means, but it's not cripplingly slow, and the price can't be beat.

Product: MSI RS480M2-IL Company: Micro Star International Price: $95 (street) Pros: Fantastic price; good integrated graphics; nice layout. Cons: No Gigabit Ethernet; performance lags behind enthusiast boards. Summary: A great, inexpensive board for quiet Media Center PCs or small casual-computing desktops. Performance-minded enthusiasts need not apply. Rating:

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Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in ExtremeTech.

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