One of the most important aspects of any motherboard is its overall layout. This can affect everything from the initial installation right up to adding new PCI cards or upgrading your HSF. In this case, the MSI 845 Ultra is designed about as well as you can expect and is an absolute joy to use.
The 478-pin Pentium 4 socket is positioned well and the corresponding CPU Fan header is right next to it in a virtually perfect location. The CPU socket is also relatively open, to allow easier installation and removal of the Pentium 4 and HSF unit. The three DIMM sockets are in the standard board location, with the ATX power connector, and floppy/IDE connectors situated at the outer edge of the board. Overall, the top portion of the 845 Ultra is both easy to use and provides excellent airflow over the CPU and memory.
MSI has employed a very functional 1 AGP/5 PCI/1 CNR slot format with the 845 Ultra. All of these slots are well-positioned and are mostly free from physical conflicts with other jumpers or board sockets. The common problem of installing an AGP card, then not being able to add memory is not really an issue here, though it is still a tight fit with DIMM 1. On the RAID boards, the two extra IDE connectors are situated at the lower portion of the PCB and should not interfere with any peripherals.
The ATX backplate arrangement is far more standard than we expected to find on a Pentium 4 845D motherboard. It's basic ATX 2.0 all the way, with none of the nifty stacked-sound/network options you'll find on products from Intel, Gigabyte, ABIT or others. While there are far too-many pseudo-standards with new 845D motherboards, some of the designs have some real esthetic and functional advantages. This leads to the only real negative to the 845 Ultra, the absence of any on-board LAN capabilities.
The size of the 845 Ultra should also be mentioned. MSI has used somewhat of a "tweener" 12"x9" board size that is just a bit larger than a standard motherboard, but a bit smaller than one of those full-size models. The size is about perfect for a Pentium 4 motherboard, but in the two cases we used for reference testing, the outer edge of the 845 Ultra sat in a no-man's land between the standard screw holes on the motherboard tray. This was alleviated by placing spacers in the open area, thereby lending the board more support and protected it from the dangers of PCB flexing.
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