CeBIT 2002 Part 2 - CPUs, Cooling, Motherboards, & Video

MSI

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MSI's KT333 motherboard is the KT3 Ultra. It can monitor CPU temperature through the CPU's internal sensor. It features a Promise IDE controller, and unfortunately also a small heatsink with fan on the north bridge, instead of a larger passive heatsink.

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The MSI K7D-Master is MSI's AMD 760MPX-based dual Athlon board. CPU temperature is monitored through NTCs only, not using the CPU's own sensor. All current is supplied by the standard ATX power supply connector. On one hand, this is an advantage, since no power supply with special connector is required. On the other hand, it doesn't force users to have a newer power supply potentially raising some support issues for MSI. It'll be interesting to note how many support calls MSI gets about system instability or boards not posting with the culprit being the power supply.

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Here's MSI's i845-based motherboard without onboard graphics.

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MSI's 854G-based solution with onboard graphics

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And here's a SIS chipset motherboard from MSI. Quite unusual are the large heatsinks that cool all the transistors of the voltage regulation circuit.

This raises a question: are large heatsinks on the voltage regulators a good sign? The voltage regulation circuit on today's motherboards are nothing more than a little switching power supply. If it is well-designed, its power dissipation is very low, and little or no heatsinks are required (note that MSI's high end board, the KT3 Ultra, as well as ASUS' or ABIT's boards have no heatsinks on the voltage regulator's transistors). So, large heatsinks on a motherboard's voltage regulators might also be a sign of a poor voltage regulation circuit with a high power dissipation. But then, maybe MSI added the large heatsinks just for additional safety - we certainly can't judge the quality of a motherboard's voltage regulators just by looking at the size of the heatsinks.

Future MSI motherboards might no longer have the mounting holes for through-motherboard heatsink mounting; in fact, on of the Athlon boards presented by MSI on CeBIT already came without the holes.