Board Layout:

MSI has paid close attention to the board’s layout, as it's generally clean and lacks the unnecessary nuisances. The passive chipset cooler is located right underneath the socket, which is a desirable spot. The only issue we have with the cooler is that it’s passive. For the extreme enthusiast out there, the board could get as much cooling as necessary. Right next to the socket are rows of capacitors that may or may not pose issues with larger heatsinks, but our testing with Zalman and Thermalright heatsinks went fine, so it’s probably a safe assumption that the popular brands in the market will most likely fit on the board. MSI has even taken the liberty to cool the MOSFETs with aluminum heatsinks. It looks like this budget offering from MSI is more or less geared towards the enthusiast in mind. The two holes adjacent to the socket are for the included heatsink bracket that must be attached before you install the cooler on the microprocessor. We are not sure why MSI didn’t attach the bracket in the first place, as it is easily removable, but we are guessing it’s because of the fact that some users might want to install water-cooling setups on it, and MSI probably wanted to save labor by pre-installing something that can easily be installed by users.

Perhaps the only issue we have with the board’s layout thus far is the placement of its 4-pin, 12v power connector. You will most likely have to warp the cable around the heatsink/socket area to reach the spot. This will become quite a hassle if you have one of the latest modular power supplies that are known to be strict with cable stiffness. Other than that, the layout around this area is fairly pleasant.

MSI’s FSR is equipped with three color-coded memory slots that support up to 2GB of PC3200/PC2700/PC2100 memory. Right around the top corner of the memory slot includes a 3-pin CPU fan connector, which is also at a pleasant location. MSI’s popular "Dynamic Overclocking" feature, codenamed CoreCell, practically touches the two memory slots and actually comes in the way when you are trying to install the modules, but considering that many users won’t be fiddling with system memory too much, we will consider it as a loose mistake on MSI’s part. The 24-pin power supply connector, a floppy connector and two IDE connectors are located towards the far end of the board. This location is usually ideal for numerous case designs. When motherboard makers primarily put their connectors on the bottom-side of the board, namely Abit, it usually causes cabling issues in larger sized cases like Thermaltake’s Xaser III.

Moving to the end of the board, we see two orange SATA connectors that are powered by VIA’s VT8237 southbridge with transfer speeds up to 150MB/s and support for RAID 0 and 1. Let us now mention that MSI offers two boards (one for the economy class, the other for the enthusiast community) on the KT800 chipset. The first one is the FSR that is being evaluated today; this is the board that MSI labels it as economy class, and as you can see, there are spots for an additional IDE connector and two additional SATA connectors. In the enthusiast version of the board, the FIS2R will have Promise 20378 disk controller that would support the aforementioned connectors plus RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 capabilities. This is a common trend among manufacturers to offer two boards of the same model and take out high-end features to differentiate between the prices. This is why you see the PCB tracings for additional connectors and a disk controller. The necessary power, reset, hard drive LED, power LED and speaker connectors are located at the bottom of the board. Like many of the manufacturers today, the pins are usually color-coded to make the installation process easier.

Another thing we would like to point out is the distance between AGP and memory slots. Many motherboards, usually the ones from Gigabyte, faced issues between the two suggested slots. Usually, motherboard makers would put the AGP and memory slots so close to each other that you would have to remove the graphics card first to install the memory modules. Thankfully, MSI has taken care of this issue and more and more manufacturers are keeping this in mind. Yet again, the layout is smooth throughout the board.

The audio on-board is provided by Realtek’s ALC655 chipset. The audio codec is compliant with AC97 specifications and supports six channels of audio. The board also has an on-board SPDIF out connector to support the necessary peripherals.

The board offers one COM1 port, one parallel port, eight USB 2.0 ports (VIA’s VT8237), three audio ports, one SPDIF port, and one Gigabit controller. The Gigabit controller is powered in part by Realtek’s 8110S controller with transfer speeds up to 1000MB/s. As you can see, MSI has removed the second COM port, which is usually unnecessary in today’s times when almost all peripherals are USB compatible.

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