Truth to be told, what make me interested about this mobo is it's Vcore regulator. Yes, it is there phases only, but how well it was build! Look at the unusually high number of ceramic SMD caps towards the CPU socket and no missing SMD caps into the socket. Yes, in the last line there are each second omitted, but that could be fixed easily...
On the Vcore input are four pieces of caps, witch is sadly rare sight today's and on some over-optimized boards (or over-cut down on caps) that over-stress the PSUs is even only ONE cap with laughable 270uF capacity. Showing the bank of there input caps, now a 1500uF Samxon GC ones
Firt there was used, for the P4 heatsink attachment necessary place, a 1000uF Chemi-con and 820uF Fujitsu polymer. I bet you agree that replacing them with 2x 2700uF Samxon URL polymers are luxury for the CPU
How many companies produce mainboards with 2700uF big polymers? I know about neither todays... but I could be wrong, of course
I did not forget about the small caps near chipset too and mainboard get instead of crappy Teapos the best it can get in d6.3 - a 470uF Smxon GD 6.3V:
In this odd spot was originally a 33uF Teapo cap, so I did not experimented much and I tried a Samxon GK 47uF cap there to be sure it will work
From the DIMM rams powering circuit comrades from MSI stolen a mosfer, so I try compensate this loss with at least nice Samxon GC 1000uF 6.3V caps. Rest are 100uF 25V Samxon GK ones. Instead of noname/Teapo ones the mainboard must be very happy now.
And one more photo of the bios - there the comrades from MSI save money on socket, so if there something happen with the bios, then the board is dead...
And now I'm ready for testing!
And now come a problem - friend who give me this mobo did not include with it the P4 heatsink holder - the black PVC part that is attached with four screws on the board and hold all P4 heatsinks into place.
So I choosed a Zalman CNPS 9500A LED and slapped it on the CPU die (thanks to HoNY for this naked P4 CPU anyway!) thru a layer of AS5 and begin the testing phase. While holding the heatsink in place with one hand. So from a USB flash drive I booted the DSL - Damn Small Linux - witch is Linux that has 50MB size, in like 2 min it boot w/o any kind of installation and you are in 1024 x 768 x 32bit and 75Hz X-windows GUI. You can set higher resolution, if you want to as we as refresh rate - at least on the Intel integrated graphic it worked well. The surprise was, that even the integrated NIC was detected and after just entering the IP address of my machine I choosed, my gataway (my router) and IP of DHCP server of my ISP and clicking on OK - I was on the net! Amazing! No waiting, no restarts, reboots... just click and it works! Shocking, for windows user.
And in these 50MB is included a Firefox as well! Fantastic! I immediately started browsing on 4chan for big pics to see, how it can handle that
However then the P4 heat up, the AS5 become slippery and I felt that the heatsink kinda lost contact with the die for a short while... witch make me scared. Even the CPU survived, I had enough. My fingers hurt, so I power the machine down (Linux powering down is a bit slower, tough) and enough of this testing w/o P4 heatsink holder
Another friend already promised to give me one, so I hope it will be here soon to resume testing of this interesting board and perhaps finding a usable bios for it too. The P4 I got can be overclocked past 3.1GHz, so... running it on default 2GHz speed is a shame.
MSI 6541 v1.0
