At this point you might be wondering what are the differences between the Intel 815 and 815E chipsets. The Intel 82815 northbridge portions are the same between chipsets, and only the 82801BA southbridge of the i815E has been upgraded from the 82801AA used with the i815. Naturally, the enhancements of the i815E relate to the disk and I/O portions and include ATA-100 support, quad USB ports, and the integrated LAN connect interface. Other than that, the two chipsets have similar northbridge features, such as 66/100/133MHz system bus speeds, AGP 4X and SDRAM support.

The MSI 815E Pro is an extremely compact motherboard, coming in at 8”x12”. This gives the board a bit less width than with most standard BX or Apollo Pro 133/A motherboards and allows extremely easy installations. While the smaller size is an advantage in some areas, with the myriad connectors, slot and jumpers present on the board, perhaps a bit more real estate might not have been a bad thing.

MSI has employed a very robust 1 AGP/6 PCI/1 CNR format with the 815E Pro. The design allows for an optional ISA slot, but none was present in the review board. Unlike other boards with bolt-on ATA-66 controllers or other IRQ-hogging devices, the 815E Pro allows bus master devices on all six PCI slots. There are also no jumpers near the AGP or PCI slots, so when the system is fully equipped with peripheral cards and adjustments, you will not need to remove cards to make hardware adjustments. That said, the CD-in, aux-in and modem-in connectors are very close to the AGP slot, and the design could have benefited by moving them a bit further up.

The 815E Pro features four DIMM sockets supporting a maximum of 512 MB of system memory. This relatively low memory limit is due to the motherboard's limitation concerning double-sided DIMMs in both DIMM socket 3 and 4. The DIMM sockets support Table Free memory and allow DIMM sockets to be filled in any order. Adjacent to the DIMM sockets are the floppy and dual-IDE connectors. All three connectors are spaced far enough apart to allow clamping IDE and floppy cables, and the IDE connectors are color coded to ensure easy installation.

Installing memory is also very simple, with the possible exception of DIMM socket 4; there are two capacitors right in front that can hamper both memory installation and removal from that socket. The area around the DIMM sockets is also troublesome in another way. The Overclocking Jumper (where the initial FSB speed is selected) is right next to the DIMM sockets and pretty well wedged between DIMM 4 and one of the resistors. Micro-Star has a long history of misplacing this jumper and sadly, this new design does nothing to change it. In the 1.0A revision of the system manual, the jumper settings are also mislabeled, so experimentation might be required to hit some of the higher bus speeds.