The BIOS

The MSI 694T Pro board we reviewed came equipped with AMIBIOS V1.43.  This version offers a nice array of adjustments, particularly in the Advance Chipset & Hardware Monitor screens.  When it comes to overclocking a motherboard, the more settings available the better.  With the 694T Pro, the BIOS provides an ample amount of adjustments to help refine and perfect an attempted overclock.

With a vast array of Memory, AGP, and key Voltage adjustments, the 694T Pro has all the tools to get the board overclocked and stabilized.  So without further delay, let's start to take a look and see how this board performed when put it through some real-world tests.  After that, we'll start playing around with some BIOS settings to see if we can't give our test system a little boost...

 

HotHardware Test Systems Zesty...

Intel Pentium III "Tualatin" 1.20GHz. Global Win FOP38 7000RPM Cooler 256 Mushkin PC133 Rev. 3+ RAM MSI 694T PRO Motherboard Gigabyte GeForce 3 Video card 15GB IBM 7200RPM ATA 100 Hercules Game Theater XP Windows Millennium Direct X 8.0a VIA 4.32 Chipset Drivers nVidia reference drivers version 12.41

Intel Pentium III "Tualatin" 1.20GHz. Global Win FOP38 7000RPM Cooler 256 Mushkin PC133 Rev. 3+ RAM Intel D815EEA2 Motherboard Gigabyte GeForce 3 Video card 15GB IBM 7200RPM ATA 100 Hercules Game Theater XP Windows Millennium Direct X 8.0a Intel ATA Storage Drivers 6.1 nVidia reference drivers version 12.41

 

For our benchmarking of the MSI 694T Pro, we've included comparison benchmarks from our baseline system using the Intel D815EEA2 motherboard.  This should highlight the strengths and weakness' of the VIA Apollo Pro 133T vs. the Intel i815E chipsets.

 

Business and Content Creation Winstone Bring it on.

The first test we ran was Business Winstone 2001, an acid test of today's intensive business-oriented applications.  Below it is clearly seen that the performance of the two systems is virtually identical.
 

 

Next we ran Content Creation Winstone 2001, which stresses system performance with graphic intensive applications such as Adobe Photoshop 5.5.  Again, the performance difference is nil.
 

 

Clearly the VIA Apollo Pro 133T offers performance equivalent to that of the i815 chipset when it comes to real world application performance.  From the solid numbers we've seen here, you can't go wrong with either system.

Let us now break away form the real world for a moment and see what happens when we start fiddling with some BIOS settings...hmmm?

 

Overclocking The MSI 694T Pro Motherboard Taking it to the limit...

In previous reviews we had no problem pushing our Tualatin processor up to 1.47GHz. without any voltage adjustments.  With the MSI 694T Pro motherboard, we were only held back by the maximum available FSB setting of 160MHz.  At this setting, the processor ran at a solid 1.45GHz., a gain of over 20%!  Although we would have liked the opportunity to go a little higher, it's hard to complain about a 20% increase in system horsepower.

Let's move on and see how this gain translates to low-level benchmarking as well as gaming...