Tenpin bowling and Football and a good film. I enjoy DIY and building computers. My guitar heroes a...
Tenpin bowling and Football and a good film. I enjoy DIY and building computers. My guitar heroes are Joe satriani, Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen....and YES I am a Metallica fan. 8 July 2007 - Metallica at Wembley Stadium -- GREAT
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I purchased the RS482M4-ILD motherboard on 10th November 2005. The board arrived complete with a variety of cables. The board was well packaged and looks quite robust.
For a review with all pictures search for MSI RS482M4-ILD review .This board is based on the RADEON 200 chipset. It includes on board Video.
What you get in the box:Amongst the cables there is a SATA power cable and a SATA motherboard to disk cable. You also get 1 IDE and 1 Floppy cables. There is a Serial port via ribbon cable, TVS-Video and SPDIF connectors and 8channel sound via another cable. MSI provide software that includes a utility for checking all the updates available for your motherboard. This works well and it will inform you if your software is current or not. You can select all the updates that you want. Fitting the motherboard to your ATX case. The manual will show you pictures and procedures for fitting the CPU socket. In my case the CPU socket came pre-assembled and I did not have to do anything to it. By the way my AMD64 came with a heat sink and fan(all in one box from AMD). I was wondering about the thermal paste that is required for the CPU & heatsink(there are multiple warnings everywhere about this) and I could not find this inside the box..... once again there was no need to worry as the supplied AMD heatsink had a pad of thermal compound already applied to it ready to adhere to CPU ( I did ring suppliers and verify). Installing CPU and Heatsink was fairly routine, the CPU only goes in correctly one way - refer to manual on this if you are unsure. Don't forget to cable up the CPU fan, this one is a must !!!!!! Forget the CPU fan and your CPU will FRY !!!!! There are 2 fan power headers on the motherboard labelled CPU and SYS. Use the CPU header.
Connecting the PSU to motherboard. The motherboard has a 24 pin connector and a 4 pin connector and these must be connected to PSU for the correct working of the motherbord. However this board works with a 20 pin PSU connector. This is what I have in my setup and it works fine. The manual also mentions this on page 2-9 (on my version). A must is a BIOS update !!!! The bios is an AMI BIOS The current bios is v1.1 . This version fixes memory speed problems.
This Mobo will take all versions of the AMD64 that are out there including the dual core AMD64. I have 2G of ram. You also install a PCIExpress Graphics card if you're into serious gaming but test on the on board graphics engine as it is very good performer.
I have not tested the SATA as I'm still using a 160GB IDE drive. I will be testing winxp64 soon and will put up the results here.
I am very pleased with this MoBo. It is good value for money as it comes with onboard Graphics (Yes you also get a DVI and a VGA sockets) and PCI Express Video slot. I will be putting on winXP64 soon and I will update my review on my web site accordingly. If you want to ask me any questions or want a full copy of my review let me know..
Pictures
All the connectors at the back
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