Layout and features
MSI's trademark red PCB on show once again. The general layout of the GNB MAX2 is good. Our attention is immediately drawn to the heatsinks the top-right corner.
MSI have recently introduced passive MOSFET cooling on some of their higher specified motherboards. Whilst I applaud this measure, the actual fitting leaves a little to be desired, as you can see from the above picture. The GNB MAX2 has taken a slight re-design from the original Granite Bay-based MAX. The ZIFF socket is now rotated towards the DIMM slots. I feel as if it helps give this particular motherboard a slightly cleaner look.
A rather beefy aluminium Northbridge heatsink has a slightly irritating 40mm fan sitting on top. If you're into quiet PCs, switching this off may be in order. I ran the motherboard through a complete stress test with the fan unconnected. You would do this at your own risk, however.
Further, should you wish to push your MAX2 even further than the BIOS voltages allow, the ubiquitous HIP6301CB voltage regulator is no longer located within the retention frame. It now sits near the 4-pin 12v power connector.
Granite Bay, as you may know, works best when used in dual-channel mode. What that means is that one should use DIMMs of equal size and specification, sitting alongside one another. As present Granite Bay motherboards are only capable of supporting DDR266 speeds officially, they meet the 533 FSB P4's 4.26GB/s memory requirements well (assuming efficiency). The new Canterwood and Springdale offerings will take a quantum leap in FSB, up from 533 to 800, both in dual-channel mode. Granite Bay, though, is Intel's only 8x AGP-compliant chipset, currently. It also supports Hyper-Threading CPUs.
The GNB MAX2 arrives with a number of distinct motherboards under its banner, usually differentiated on the basis of features. The review sample, a GNB MAX2-L, omits the optional RAID features. If you look at the very first picture of the motherboard, you'll see the RAID port and controller positions are silk-screened. The colour-coded bracket headers are a nice touch.
Sound is well catered for via the Realtek ALC650 PHY. The ALC650 is an 18-bit, full duplex AC'97 2.2 compatible stereo audio CODEC. It natively supports full surround sound 5.1 configuration with a maximum of 6 separate or discrete channels (Left, Right, Center, SL, SR and Sub). MSI have also bundled their S-Bracket to maximise the on-board sound's usefulness.
The workstation nature of the MSI motherboard reveals itself with the inclusion of Intel's integrated Gigabit Ethernet.
A pretty standard backplane. Integrated LAN is commonplace nowadays, although Gigabit LAN isn't.
