Stability, overclocking and compatibility
Our primary concern here at Hexus isn't necessarily performance, differing motherboards based one chipset usually perform within a few percent of each other. What is imperative, however, is having absolute stability. All the performance in the world counts for very little when you encounter unexpected crashes and poor reliability in general.
It seems evident that today's motherboards offer excellent levels of stability, engineers know how to design a stable motherboard. We have come to expect 100% stability at stock speeds. However, at Hexus, we only consider a motherboard stable if it can pass our various motherboard-bashing tests once all available voltages and speeds have been raised. We're happy to report that our stubborn attempts into making the 645E Max-LRU didn't come to much. Increasing voltages and speeds made no difference to overall stability, the hallmark of a stable motherboard.
I've been personally using this motherboard for the past 5 days and have not encountered one crash that could directly attributable to the 645E Max-LRU, impressive going. As much a testament to SiS' chipset as to MSI's design team.
We know that it is capable of 133FSB operation, the box cover is testament to that. What we were eager to find out was just how far it could go with the limited Vcore on offer. The 1.6v Vcore on offer effectively translated to 1.5v under load. We used a highly overclockable 1.6GHz NW and were able to hit 157FSB with excellent stability. 160FSB+ resulted in random crashes. We believe the crashes were a result of a Vcore rather than chipset limitation.
Here is how SiSoft Sandra saw it, note the unknown 0646 chipset. We're sure that with more core voltage on offer, we'd have been able to hit 160FSB with ease. Still, the 645E Max-LRU does exactly what it says on the box, it runs at 133FSB flawlessly.
Compatibility testing consists of trying various components in all available locations. The 645E Max-LRU is graced with 3 DIMM slots. We tried 3 different brands of PC2700 memory and were able to run at 150FSB with decent timings. We also used various AGP and PCI cards, all worked first time, every time, without fail. We've come to expect this, so this was no great surprise.
The stability and compatibility are excellent, overclockability was good, only let down by the limited voltage adjustment on offer.
One note we have to make here is the temperatures reported by BIOS. At the default settings of 1600MHz and 1.5v Vcore, with a moderate air cooler, we usually expect a BIOS CPU temperature of around 44 - 46c, the 645E Max-LRU reported the a temperature of 33 - 34c. We hope this is resolved with a BIOS release.
