MSI MS-7093 is one of the first boards that arrived in our labs based on the new ATi Radeon Express 200P chipset. During our test, we didn't find any major problems. The board runs stable at aggressive timings and proved to be stable without issues when paired with ATi or other chipset's PCI-E graphics card. Performance of this board is comparable to that of NF4 board when paired up with the same graphics card.

This board is quite complete in specifications as it comes complete with 4 SATA ports, 2 IDE, 6 ch audio, 1394, USB etc. The board does not come with overclocking features like FSB, multiplier, voltage adjustments at all. It is really a pity as we are unable to determine if there is a FIX PCI/PCI-E within the chipset that most overclockers are looking for. The only adjustments we can find are options for ASync 166,133,100 operation. HTT width can be set to operate in 8 or 16 bits. HTT freq can be set to 1GHz, 800MHz, 600Mhz, 400 MHz.

In terms of features, this board sports 6 USB 2.0 ports (4 at the back, 2 via extensions), 6ch audio by Realtek ALC658. Ethernet, 1394. It also comes with 4 SATA ports for SATA RAID supported by the south bridge SB400.

Overall, this reference board gives us a good idea of what is to be expected in retail boards using the ATi chipset.

Discuss

Pros

• 1394
• USB 2.0 
• Ethernet

Cons

• No IDE RAID
• No Overclocking features

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.