MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R (875P): Our favorite thus far

MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R: Stress Testing

We managed to stress test the MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R in several different areas and configurations, including:

1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing was conducted by running the FSB at 241MHzMHz.
2. Memory stress testing was conducted by running RAM at 333MHz and 400MHz in dual DDR operation at the most aggressive timings possible.

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:

As usual we ran a large load of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure the 875P Neo-FIS2R was absolutely stable at each overclocked FSB speed we experimented with. We ran our usual array of stress tests, including Prime95 torture tests, which were run in the background for a total of 48 hours. We also proceeded to run lots of other tasks such as data compression, various DX8 games, and light apps like Word and Excel while Prime95 was running in the background. Finally, we reran our entire benchmark suite, which includes Sysmark 2002, Quake3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, and XMPEG. In the end, 241MHz FSB was the highest overclock we were able to achieve with our conservative overclocking setup without encountering any reliability problems.

Memory Stress Test Results:

The following memory stress test gauges how well the MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R is able to handle dual DDR333 mode with all memory banks filled. This has proven to be a simple task for the vast majority of Dual Channel DDR Pentium 4 motherboards based on SiS and Intel chipsets, so let's see if the 875P Neo-FIS2R is any different:

Again, nothing surprising here, a dual channel DDR400 motherboard like the 875P Neo-FIS2R shouldn't have problems running in this configuration. Anything significantly worse than these memory timing results (like CAS 2.5/3T/6T/3T) would be unacceptable.

Here is where we've seen some variation in memory timing capabilities, though thankfully no platform has really shown any large degree of variance. This more strenuous situation includes all four memory banks filled to capacity running in dual DDR400 mode:

This is actually the largest degree of variance we've seen from any dual channel DDR Pentium 4 motherboard at 400MHz DDR. Even though these aren't the best timings available, the real world performance difference is negligible.

As usual, we ran several memory stress tests and general apps to make sure all these timings were stable. We started off by running Prime95 torture tests; a grand total of 24 hours of Prime95 was successfully run at the timings listed in the above charts. We also ran Sciencemark (memory tests only) and Super Pi. Neither stress test was able to bring the 875P Neo-FIS2R to its knees.