first
STOP!!!!!
okay, whew....that was close.
I am currently writing up a review about the MSI 945GT Speedster, it's taking me some time. The board is good but it has problems....you should seriously consider an alternative.
to address your questions:
" 1. Will this work?? The stuff fits in the box, but will it overheat? "
you'll be fine as long as you go with the mobile CPU, you are definitely headed in the right direction.
". Am I right in looking at the mobile C2D? Or would I be better of with the E6400? Cheaper, more mobo's to choose from, but also more heat?"
I firmly believe that you are right - my recent experiance with using a mobile Core Solo has taught me that reducing the heat from the CPU is a BIG factor for making a quiet system.
MSI 945 GT speedster has some problems - the video will cut out before windows finishes loading (although it works just fine in safe mode)
Bios options as listed in the manual are not in the actual bios
if you get this board, try to find an old P4 478 desktop heatsink and the motherboad mounting bracket from a P4 478 motherboard - the included heatsink and fan are very very loud, and you will never have a quiet system.
one of the Abit or Asus boards are probably a better choice at this moment. I still use and like the MSI 945GT speedster, but I use it as a server and just remote desktop into it...
also check the reviews of the board on newegg
I will post the full review when I finish it, but here is what I have typed up for you to look at.
The MSI 945GT Speedster Motherboard in Detail
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Here's the kit in all it's glory.
Oddly, the box has a large orange sticker that says "Server Force". As I started building the system around this motherboard I could tell that MSI had no idea which market they wanted to target with this board...the server market, workstation, or HTPC..... and their eventual lack of commitment does show to some degree.
A four port USB extension and a firewire extension rounded out the usual IDE/Floppy/Sata cables that were included in the kit. The manual was entirely in english and seemed well documented. A driver disk was also included.
One small observation: while installing the ram, it took a lot of force, I mean *a lot*, to get a stick of ram into a virgin DDR2 slot on this board. Honestly, it took more force than I was comfortable with applying...
Disappointment Sets In
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Now let's take a look at the included heatsink/fan combo. While it was nice of MSI to include this, it didn't take long for me to see that this was pretty much the worst design I have ever seen. The heat sink is "wafer thin" and with the fan attached to the top, there is almost no place for air to clearly flow. I did test the fan out on another motherboard....and yes, it sounds just like a hair-dryer on "high"....totally unacceptable for me, and in a workstation it would probably be annoying at even at low speed. Speedfan reported the fan spinning at an incredible 5,400 rpm! Here are some pics:
That last pic above shows the propriety Heatsink frame with the spring bars. The four holes in the motherboard for heatsink mounting are spaced precisely the same as for the desktop Pentium 4 socket 478, which really worked out great for me as I had a old desktop socket 478 heatsink and mounting frame just sitting in a drawer!
The mounting frame actually came off an old Asus P4P800-VM motherboard. When the CPU finally arrived from the EBay seller (only took 12 days...*groan*) I popped it in and low and behold, I could tell there was quite a gap between top of the on chip heat spreader and the bottom of my P4 heatsink!! having eyeballed it several time and compared the depth of the included heatsink with the P4 heasink, I knew this was going to be an issue.
Abe Lincoln Would Be Proud
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Now I was stuck....what to do....what to do....I had about 2 mm of gap that I needed to close....the answer came to me after about 20 seconds of panic. I needed to find a penny minted before 1982, and i needed it now! I sifted through the change drawer and found a nice 1979 example...perfect.
Pennies after 1982 are mostly zinc, lighter than the higher copper content ones minted prior to 1983, and have horrible thermal conductivity. While my 1979 penny wasn't 100% copper, it was *mostly* copper, and would do the trick. I just needed to grind down both sides until they were flat. 15 minutes, a dremel tool, and some mildly cooked fingers (pennies get *hot* when you grind them!) and I had my shim.
A word of caution: Altering US monetary vehicles in any way is a capitol offense and could land you in jail.
The fit was perfect, and locking down the P4 heatsink didn't put undue strain on the motherboard or CPU as the penny was just the right thickness to provide a comfortable level of tension and full contact. The P4 heatsink had a copper core and the Core solo only gives off about 27W at peak utilization, so I figure a mostly flat penny with alot of thermal compound should be fine. And, as it turned out, it works great!
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Part 2 - Acoustics, Power Consumption and Over-Clocking experiences
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Testing the motherboard and CPU:
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The first thing I wanted to test out was just how much cooling I would need with the P4 heatsink attached. The tests I conducted were open-air test on my table. I used both Prime 95 and Sisoft Sandra interchangibly to tax the cpu to 100%.
- Test 1, turn off CPU fan completely
I started with the CPU at 100% useage at a temperature of 30 degrees centigrade and then simply "pulled the plug" on the CPU fan. The core CPU temperature shot up to about 50 degrees in 5 minutes but then increasing at much slower pace. With no active cooling of any kind (no fans) on any part of the motherboard, the result was pretty interesting. For awhile, it looked like fanless was going to level off at 71-72 centigrade but after 45 minutes it started climbing again and I shut it down when it finally made it to 75 after 1 hour and 6 minutes. Potentially, it looked like it might have stabilized in the low 80's but I'm not interested it pushing it that far. What I gathered from this was the with just the most gentle of airflow, I should be able to achieve reasonable temps at a very low noise level.
- Test 2, No CPU fan but small fan on northbridge
the Northbridge chip is basically right next to the CPU, and with the CPU fan off and only a small accessory fan on Northbridge which did spill some airflow over to the CPU heatsink, the CPU temp stayed at 55 degrees centigrade. That was pretty surprising to me! Again the CPU was at 100% for over 2 hours and this was an open air experiment.
- Test 3, Modified 80mm fan
I scavenged an 80mm fan from an old Compaq micro-atx power supply and adapted it to use the 5 volt rails off the Antec PSU that I would be using. The fan spun nice and slow and was completely inaudible unless if put my ear right down to the fan. The gentelest of airflow from this arrangement was more than enough to keep the CPU at 36 degrees centigrade under a 100% load.
At this time it became clear to me that the single greatest aspect to address when creating a quiet computer is the overall heat dissipation requirements. When you start off with a system that has low power requirements, it's easy to achieve quiet results.
Over Clocking and Power Consumption
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Using a "Kill A Watt" meter, I tested the motherboard at stock speeds with a 2.5' notebook drive and got 52Watts of consumption at 100% cpu load.
Overclocking the MSI 945GT Speedster motherboard is pretty simple. The bios will only allow you to change the Bus Speed, and there are no voltage options for the CPU.
Core Solo T1200
Bus Speed FSB CPU Speed Super Pi Score Memory Speed Power Consumption
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Results with memory divider at 1:1 (667mhz)
BUS166mhz - FSB663 - CPU1.49Ghz - 39s - MEM331mhz - 48W
BUS170mhz - FSB679 - CPU1.53Ghz - 38s - MEM340mhz - 48W
BUS175mhz - FSB700 - CPU1.58Ghz - 37s - MEM350mhz - 50W
BUS180mhz - FSB720 - CPU1.62Ghz - 37s - MEM360mhz - 50W
BUS185mhz - FSB740 - CPU1.66Ghz - 35s - MEM370mhz - 50W
BUS190mhz - FSB760 - CPU1.71Ghz - 35s - MEM380mhz - 52W
Results with memory divider at 5:4 (533mhz)
BUS195mhz - FSB780 - CPU1.75Ghz - 35s - MEM312mhz - 52W
BUS199mhz - FSB795 - CPU1.79Ghz - 34s - MEM318mhz - 52W
The Super Pi utility is not a definitive benchmark by any means, but it did give me a idea about the gains I was getting by overclocking. My best score of completing the Pi calculation out to the 1 millionth place was 34 seconds. Not bad considering I only paid about $50 for the chip.
In comparison to other results I found on the internet, the core solo fits in quite respectably:
Chip Speed 1M Super Pi Score
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Core 2 Duo 3.00Ghz 19s
Pentium M Dothan 2.67Ghz 28s
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400 Toledo 2.8Ghz 31s
Core Solo** 1.79Ghz** 34s**
AMD Athlon 64 Venice 2.5Ghz 35s
AMD Opteron 144 2.7Ghz 33s
AMD Sempron 3200+ Manila 1.8Ghz 49s
AMD Duron Applebred 2.2Ghz 61s
Pentium III 450hz 370s
Overall, I think I made a good choice going with the Core Solo and a new heatsink. Considering the TDP of the Core solo, it stacks up pretty well against desktop CPU's and comparing the low power alternatives:
Chip TDP Super Pi
AMD Sempron 3200+ 35W 49s
pentiumM Dothan 27W 28s (extremely overclocked)
Core Solo 27W 34s (marginally overclocked)
I ended up just running the CPU at the stock speed setting and perhaps in the future, I may bump it up a bit. For now, it has more than enough power for my use.
***Problems****
Driver Downloads at the MSI Website
This should have been a cake walk, but it wasn't. I would classify the ease and availability of finding and downloading new drivers for this board as "A Serious Transgression". Actually I looped around through the same cycle of pages a few times before I figured out how to get out of the loop.... and I'm not easy to fool!. Other things like unnecessary pop up windows, images of the motheboard that are triggers for links but no indication it's link, took me 20 seconds and I had to scroll down to find the support/download secrtion as they didn't put it on the main menu bar up top (WTF) and instead insisted on plastering images of promotional material and ads instead. Hiding the "Download Center" link on the left margin down near the bottom . I could go on and on and on.....they should thank their stars I don't nail them for 15 points, with 8 years of website design experiance for a wide variety of industry sectors, I know a site that has "organizational cancer" when I see it. *sigh*
Heat sink & fan
Looking at the Asus XXX board, we can see what a properly (and economical) heat sink might look like. MSI's decision to go with shard of George Foreman grill and then mount a hair-dryer for a market segment that has no easy to procurr alternative in the retail market... on ebay or over at a friends house, or with some modification, I'm sure you can find something that will work. Honestly though, they could have and... more importantly...should have, done a better job. To some extent, the heat-sink does explain the big bright orange sticker on the box that says "Server Force"... the ultra low profile heat sink would lend itself to a 1U installation as would the potential noise that the fan can generate.
Driver Install
There was no check or warning to let the user know that you need to have SP2 installed in XP already for the chipset INF to properly patch. On a fresh XP install with no updates applied, the INF update installation kept asking for a usbhspd.dll - a file that was not on the CD and not on the windows XP disk, and no mention of the SP2 requirement. Until you get SP2 and the INF update applied, your USB ports are only at 1.1 speed. Newer updates from the MSI website don't include any installation instructions. Currently, there is a firmware patch for the on board NICs that I havent' tried because I would just like to know first...should this be done in DOS or can it be done in windows?..only way to find out is try it - that's just unprofessional.
Outdated drivers included
Purchased the board in December of 2006, but it came with all original drivers - the ones that had been updated 6 months prior were not included. Either I bought a board that had sat on a shelf for 6-9 months, or they didn't bother making new CD's with the recent drivers on them. humm.....
VGA ISSUE
VGA will switch off before windows finishes booting. I have not found a work around for this - still works in safe mode
It will mostly be used for TV with timeshift, DVD, surfing. Sooner or later I want to add HD capabilities - Blueray or somesuch, so HDCP on the GPU is necessary. Having it connected to a big LCD and a decent audio setup, gaming would of course be very tempting too. And it will stream music to my squeezebox - those late-night low-volume sessions makes silent operation absolutely necessary.
