MSI 845PE Max2-FIR Motherboard Review

One of the biggest problems with the i845E/G chipset is that the Pentium 4 FSB increased from 400 MHz to 533 MHz, the available memory bandwidth to the processor didn't. Consumers with 533 MHz based P4's were still paring them up with PC2100 memory and performance suffered consequently. To get around this problem, Intel has just released the i845PE/GE which officially brings the Pentium 4 processor and PC2700 DDR memory support together.As usual, MSI is one of the first manufacturers to have adopted the new i845PE chipset, and with it they produced the MSI 845PE Max2-FIR motherboard. Following the recent trends from this company we are faced with a board that has literally everything on board (in the most desirable configuration that is). With three 186-pin DIMM slots supporting up to 2 GB of PC1600/2100/2700 memory, integrated USB 2.0, Ultra DMA133 IDE RAID, hardware based 5.1 channel audio, Intel RC82540 powered Gigabit 10/100/1000 LAN, integrated IEEE 1394 Firewire and six PCI slots! With specs like that you can understand why I've just upgraded my office computer with this model board.