The reason I am reviewing this motherboard is because my hosting company was not able to meet my needs so I decided to build my own server. My hosting was being provided by Nexpoint.net until they started to give me problems. They were saying that the overload load on their server was caused by my site alone and that it was a problem with the code. After having them shut down my site and argue with me many times I got tired of it and said, “fine, ill do it myself.” I started contacting a lot of different companies to see if they would help me out with hardware. MSI was kind enough to send over their K7D Master-L which I am currently using for the OCmodshop server. I will be writing an article later on how to build and configure a server which hopefully you can use.
The MSI K7D Master-L uses the AMD 760 MPX chipset which is the successor to AMD 760. The AMD-760. MPX chipset is a high performance two-way multiprocessor core logic solution for AMD AthlonTM MP class processors, offering Multi-Processor eXtended (MPX) performance over the AMD-760 MP chipset. Extended performance is offered by the 66-MHz/64-bit/32-bit PCI bus and a feature-rich peripheral bus controller offering PCI-to-PCI bridging capability along with AC .97 audio. The high-performance of the chipset is attributed to an enhanced AMD Athlon system bus, support for DDR (Double Data Rate) memory technology, and AGP-4X Graphics Interface.
This motherboard has a lot of cool features which we will look at more as the review continues. Below is a list of the main specifications of the motherboard that I grabbed of MSI’s website.
CPU
- Supports dual Socket A (Socket-462) for AMD® Athlon™ MP processors
- Two Socket 462 for AMD® Athlon™ MP Processors 2200+ or higherChipset
AMD® 762 chipset. (North-Bridge 949 BGA) - Supports 266MHz high speed, split transaction system bus.
- AGP PRO 4x and PCI Advanced high performance memory controller. AMD® 768 chipset. (South-Bridge 492 BGA)
- Host (primary) PCI bus utilizes a 66MHz, 32-bit interface.
- AC’97 soft audio controller.
- Enhanced IDE controller. (Through to ATA-100).
- LPC bus to connect peripherals such as super IO and BIOS.
- Extensive ACPI-compliant power management logic
- IO APIC controller.
FSB
- Supports 200/266MHz FSB
Main Memory
- Four 184-pin DDR DIMM.
- Maximum memory size up to 4GB. (Registered DDR only)
Slots
- One AGP PRO slot.
- Two 64-bit/66MHz PCI slots.
- Three 32-bit/33MHz PCI slots.
On-Board IDE
- An IDE controller on the AMD 768 chipset provides IDE HDD/CD-ROM with PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA 66/100 operation modes.
- Can connect up to four IDE devices.
Audio
- Chip Integrated.
- Direct Sound AC’97 Audio.
Network
- Intel 82559ER LAN controller
- Integrated IEEE 802.3 10-BaseT & 100-BaseTX PHY.
- Wake-On-LAN and WFM 2.0
On-Board Peripherals
- 1 Floppy port supports 2 FDD with 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M and 2.88Mbytes.
- 2 Serial ports (COM A + COM B), 1 Parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode.
- 1 IrDA connector for SIR/ASKIR/HPSIR.
- 1 Audio/Game port.
- 4 USB 2.0
BIOS
- The mainboard BIOS provides AMI “Plug & Play” Flash BIOS which detects the peripheral devices and expansion cards of the board automatically.
- The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface(DMI) function which records your mainboard specifications.
Dimension
- ATX Form Factor.
Mounting
- 9 mounting holes.
The MSI K7D Master-L comes in a cool box with a lot of specs and features that the motherboard has. Some of the features include USB 2.0, PC alert III, D-Bracket, D-LED, onboard LAN, registered DDR support, and 64-bit PCI slots.
This motherboard has a red PCB which looks really cool. This board has a lot of features which I will look at later but just looking at the board you can see the 2 sockets, 4 DDR slots, 2 64bit PCI slots, 3 32 bit PCI slots, an AGP pro slot. There are four heatsinks on some of the mosfets and a heatsink on the northbirdge.
This motherboard comes with a manual, quick user’s guide, driver CD, IDE, and floppy cable, D-LED guide, and MSI D-Bracket which is has two extra USB ports and four diagnostic LEDs which can help you troubleshoot your computer if you are having problems. There are also four LEDs on the motherboard right above the game port that do the same thing. The manual for the motherboard is written very well and is easy to understand. I like that the D-Bracket is included for extra USB and better diagnostics. This motherboard is supposed to come with a USB 2.0 card but I did not receive one with this sample.
The ATX connector is in a good location at the top of the motherboard near the back so that it is out of the way. This motherboard also uses a 12v connector so that there will be more power to the components for better stability, mainly the RAM. You can also see in better detail the heatsinks on the mosfets in these pictures. I like that these are added to the motherboard because the mosfets will get hot and heat will cause damage.
The sockets have very little room around them so you will not be able to use large heatsinks on your CPU. I ended up using two SVC Golden Gate heatsinks which have a very small base. I tried fitting two Vantec Aerocools on and was unable to due to the size. There are four 184 pin DDR slots which will only take registered memory because of the fact that this is a server motherboard and it will work better.
The CMOS battery, PC speaker, and WOL connection are on the bottom of the motherboard toward the back. I like that the board comes with a PC speaker just because they are so small and don’t need to be on a case. The jumpers and the BIOS are on the bottom front of the motherboard and are well laid out so that installation of the jumpers can be quick and easy.
The K7D Master-L uses the AMD-768 southbridge which controls the secondary PCI bus. This board comes has one AGP pro slot, two 64-bit PCI slots, and 3 32-bit PCI slots. I like that the AGP pro and 64-bit PCI slots are on this motherboard because 64-bit PCI slots are used a lot with servers for things like SCSI cards and such.
The motherboard has 2 IDE channels and a floppy channel. There is no onboard IDE, SCSI, or SATA RAID on this motherboard which is a little disappointing because RAID is great for server applications. SATA isn’t possible with this chipset but IDE and SCSI could have been added. The I/O panel is pretty standard with all of the normal connections. Onboard LAN comes with the motherboard which is why it is the K7D Master-L model, the L signifies LAN.
The BIOS is the standard AWARD layout, you can see that the BIOS contains most of the same main sections as other motherboards do. There are some sections which other motherboards wont have because they aren’t server motherboards like this one.
The standard CMOS features section of the BIOS is where you can set the time, IDE devices, and a few of the other things for your system. The Advanced BIOS Features menu is where you can set your boot sequence and some of your memory options.
The Advanced chipset features section has a lot of AGP and memory options. This motherboard is designed for servers so it only takes registered RAM. The term “registered” refers to how the memory module processes signals. Registered modules contain a register that delays all information transferred to the module by one clock cycle.
Along with taking registered RAM it also uses ECC, which stands “error correcting code.” If you have a single-bit memory error, ECC memory will detect and correct the error. If you have a double-bit memory error, ECC memory will detect and report the error. I set my ECC setting to correct and scrub which will correct the error and wipe it away. There are a lot of AGP and memory settings for you to choose from so that you can get the most out of your system depending on what kind of hardware you are using.
There are a good amount of power management settings that you can choose from. Depending on what kind of server and setup you are running will determine how this all is setup. Generally you will probably not want anything powering down or anything like that. The BIOS health section displays a lot of information about your system such as temperatures, voltage, and RPM for fans. There are only warning options and no shutdown options which would have been nice to see.
The frequency/voltage control has a few options for overclocking but not many since this is a server motherboard. There are the following FSB settings: Default, 100/33 MHz, 103/34 MHz, 105/35Mhz, 110/37 MHz, 113/38 MHz, 117/39 MHz, 133/33 MHz, 138/34 MHz, 140/35 MHz, 144/36 MHz and 150/38 MHz. The CPU Ratio can be set to auto or 5 through 12.5. There are a few other options and the voltage cant be raised very high but there really isn’t a need.
Test Bed
- MSI K7D Master-L
- 470w Vantec Stealth PSU
- Adaptec 19160
- 2 IBM Ultra160 07N6266 18GB, Ultra160 Wide LVD SCSI-3, 10,000 RPM (data)
- 30GB Western Digital 7200RPM ATA100 hard drive (boot)
- 52x Liteon CDROM
- Xelo Rage128 video card
- Blue Meany case
- 1GB registered ECC PC2100 from Corsair
- 2 Athlon MP 1.2GHz
- 2 Golden Gate heatsinks
Just a note on benchmarking I did them while the server had been up for 34 days. I did not want to reboot the server because it takes a while and didn’t want any downtime.
This is the first time I have benchmarked a server so I will be using different benchmarks because of that. Instead of usual game and multimedia benchmarks like 3DMark2001SE, Quake 3, and others I will be using more intensive benchmarks that will stress the CPUs and memory rather than video and other things. For benchmarking I used SiSoft Sandra 2003 Professional, Cinebench, and Science Mark.
SiSoft Sandra 2003 professional is the newest version to the very popular benchmarking tool. This program has a lot of different informational modules and benchmarking tools. The CPU benchmark will output the MIPS and MFLOPS of the CPU or CPUs. Along with outputting the results it will show your results in comparison to other setups. With the 2 1.2GHz Thunderbirds in this motherboard this benchmark shows the ALU at 8849 and the FPU at 3593 which is a great score.
SiSoft Sandra 2003 professional has another benchmark module for a multimedia test. This benchmark will output the Interger aEMMX/aSSE and Floating-Point results from your system. The results from this setup was 13339 and 14141 both of which are really very high.
The last SiSoft benchmark I did was for the memory bandwidth. Memory bandwidth for a server is very important especially while under high load or while running powerful applications. This motherboard had 1GB of registered PC2100 which was provided by Corsair the Int Buffered score was 1534 and the Float Buffered score was 1508 both of which are really high.
After running SiSoft Sandra 2003 Professional I ran Cinebench 2000 which is a CAD benchmarking program. The benchmark runs a few different tests but I was only concered with the single CPU and multiple CPU tests. As you can see the 2 CPUs are much better and perform 1.73 times faster than 1 CPU. This is just a good example of how a dual CPU system can help with multithreaded software.
The last benchmark I ran was Science Mark which is a program that calculates very complicated scientific problems. It is a really good test to show how powerful your system is because the tests are so CPU intensive. This system did really well on all of the tests and if you would like to download the program to test your system against this server you can find it here.
I am going to be writing a guide on how to build and configure a server like the one here at OCmodshop. Until I get that done though here are some pictures of the hardware that went into the server. Much thanks to all of the companies that provided me with the hardware to get it up and running.
Conclusion
The reason I wanted a dual AMD motherboard is because I like AMD more than Intel and I wanted dual CPUs to handle the load. This was my first experience with SMP and building a server of this stature but I can honestly say I really like this motherboard. There are a lot of features and the it’s stable as a rock. It has an AGP pro slot and 2 64-bit PCI slots which is really great for high end hardware. The onboard LAN is also nice so a PCI slot isn’t used so that you can put something else where the NIC would be.
Along with all the great features that this motherboard offers it looks awesome with the red PCB. The only thing that I did not really like was the fact that there was not enough room around the sockets for a good sized heatsink and that there was no onboard RAID or SCSI. Overall I am going to give this motherboard a 10/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to really thank MSI for giving me this motherboard to review. I would also like to thank the other companies who contributed hardware so the server would run.
Pros
- Great server motherboard
- Will take up to 4GB of registered RAM
- 2 64-bit PCI slots
- AGP pro slot
- Onboard LAN and audio
- USB 2.0 with the card
- Cool red PCB
- Hot components are cooled by heatsinks
- Stable as a rock
Cons
- No onboard RAID or SCSI
- Very little room around the sockets