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ZD
Winbench
Scores
taken from the Ziff Davis Winbench Suite are
indicative of real world business application
performance. What we see here is that the
MS-6309 brings excellent CPU and FPU
performance. The disk scores are on the low
side when compared to other Intel BX or i820
solutions but this is part in parcel to the
drivers with the Apollo Pro133A chipset.
Hopefully these will mature and improve over
time. All in all, a respectable showing
here.
So,
let's have some fun...
Quake
3 Arena Timedemo w/ DDR GeForce Graphics
These
benchmarks were taken with the 3.68 version of the
NVidia reference drivers. We felt it was
fair to give you data on official release drivers.
Although the 5.13 drivers that are out on the net
did deliver about a 5% frame rate improvement
across the board. These scores show that the
MS-6309 and the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset can
out perform even the i820 and BX chipset
boards, at clock speeds below 800MHz. Above
800MHz., i820 solutions start to pull away.
Regardless, these are excellent scores which will
make any hard core gamer happy.
Our
final assessment on the MS-6309 is filled with
mixed emotions. On one hand there are a few
nagging issues with this board that need to be
corrected. We can only hope MSI responds
with BIOS releases addressing the Clear CMOS and
overclocking issues. In addition a
board spin to move the Fan Power Header to a more
convenient location, would be the icing on the
cake. The former BIOS fixes are more likely,
however.
On the other hand, the MS-6309 has the potential
to be one of the fastest VIA PC133 based boards on
the market with its excellent overall CPU, Memory
and Gaming performance. It was surprising to
say the least, how stable and fast it was when
compared to others in the field. With a few
small tweaks, the folks at MSI will add a
fantastic new product to their portfolio.
We
give the MSI MS-6309 a HotHardware Heat Meter
Rating of...
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