ONE LAST HURRAH: Before saying Goodbye to my Beloved MSI Eclipse!!!

[bartman1973]

ONE LAST HURRAH: Before saying Goodbye to my Beloved MSI Eclipse!!!
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Well it has been two months since I purchased this MSI Eclipse SLI board and while waiting for its bigger brother MSI Eclipse Plus, I would like to try out a new board from another manufacturer. Before I pass this board to its new owner, I decided to give it a little review to so that other people who will be upgrading to i7 platform will have some idea how good or how bad this board is.
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A few months ago and maybe until now, Eclipse is the flagship board of MSI in terms of i7 based motherboard. Its bigger brother MSI Eclipse Plus has already been sighted in some forums but no definite date yet on when it will be available in the market.
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The Box
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The size of the box was way bigger than my old P45 motherboards. It is actually almost 2x the size of the conventional ATX board box.
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Upon opening the panel on the box, you will see a lot of information about the board! You will also see the added stuff from MSI like the Green Power Genie as well as the awesome Creative Xfi! Yes, a creative Xfi Extreme Audio PCIe sound card was included on the package.
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Upon opening the box, you will see a plastic container (I am assuming that this is anti-static) that contains the motherboard, DLED2, Green Power Genie and creative X-fi.
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The Board and Layout:
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The board came with 10 sata ports! 6 of them in 90 degrees are connected to the ICH10 and the 4 are actually by the jmicron chips attached to the board and also function as

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[bartman1973]

Re: ONE LAST HURRAH: Before saying Goodbye to my Beloved MSI Eclipse!!!

Bios and overclocking

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Overclocking and Benchmarking Results
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Since I have not installed anything yet on my new board, I decided just to compare the stock and overclock result from this board.
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Below are the lists of components that I will be using
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Intel Core i7 920 2.66ghz ( cooled by Thermalright HR 01 plus )

MSI 8800gtx (well a bit old but still reliable)
Team Extreme ddr3 1600 @ 8-8-8-25 rated 1.65V
Western digital Raptor 74gb 16MB cache
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SPI Stock and 4Ghz OC Results
Stock = 15.313s

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4Ghz = 10.405s

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PC Mark 05 Stock and 4 Ghz OC Result
Stock = 9745

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4Ghz = 13136

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3DMark 05 Stock and 4Ghz OC results
Stock = 13388

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4Ghz = 14289

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3DMark vantage Stock and 4Ghz OC Results
Stock = 8160 ( 33530 on CPU score )

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4Ghz = 8315 ( 43567 CPU score )

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Aquamark Stock and Overclock
Stock = 131812 ( 18685 CPU score )

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4Ghz = 179261 ( 23139 CPU score )

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I tried playing with bclock since I have seen people in several forum saying that their boards( not specific to MSi eclipse ) / i7 proc cannot go above 200 or maybe just above 200 bclock. After doing some tweak I was able to get 215 bclock and the max I was able to get is 218, All the test that had been done are just after vista installation. No tweaks done on windows.
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SPI = 10.343 ( 19 x 215 )

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SPI = 10.030s ( 19 x 218 )

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Wrap-up / Conclusion
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I did encounter IOH temperature issue when I first bought this motherboard. IOH temperature is at 65C and this still goes up while running benchmarking tests. I made minor modifications on the board and as far as I know, it did not void the warranty. Below are the modifications that I have made:

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• Removed the violet thermal paste that MSI used and replaced it with Artic Silver 5.
• Removed the plastic pushpin and replaced it with a bolt and plastic nut.
• Added a 40mmfan that is just enough to take out the heat from the IOH

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Guess what, the temperature after these is just below 55C even under benchmarking (done during night time and I would expect that this will go to probably 60 degrees during daytime given the tropical climate in the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Philippines</st1:place></st1:country-region>).
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I was able to overclock my i920 at 3.6ghz without even adjusting anything on the voltages. Meaning they are at stock settings! I managed to reach 4.0 ghz by simply adding 0.040v (around 1.29 Vcore only)
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Pros
- Easy to overclock board
- Supports both SLI and crossfire
- No issue on bigger after market cooling
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- Creative Xfi included
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Cons
- Only one SLI bridge included. It would have been better if a tri SLI connector was given by MSi.
- IOH temp an issue for my board. Need to monitor and maybe try my modifications.
- Power/Reset/DLED Switches location will not be accessible if a 3<SUP>rd</SUP> video card is installed.
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Other thoughts
- It would have been better if the BIOS of the eclipse comes with nominal values on the Cell Menu. This is to serve as guide for the users if they are trying to alter the voltages.
- Maybe swap the ide and the sata 7 to 10 ports? It is better looking if all 10 sata ports are on 90 degrees. It will also ensure that even if you use 2 or 3 video cards, it will not hit any of the sata 7-10 cables if you use them.

[bartman1973]

Re: ONE LAST HURRAH: Before saying Goodbye to my Beloved MSI Eclipse!!!

I will try to compare this with my new board which is gigabyte ud5 extreme soon. I am just flooded with a lot of stuff to do righyt now. I am not giving justice yet to my ud5 extreme since it is just running at stock hahaha :)