Microstar International's MS-6337 -  i815E Pro
Our second pass at the i815E and it gets better every time.

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
9/27/00

 

HotHardware's Test System
Driven by MSI

LiteOn Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 933EB, MSI MS-6337 Motherboard, 128MB of PC133 True CAS2 SDRAM from Corsair (thanks Outside Loop), IBM 15Gig 7200 RPM ATA100 Hard Drive (thanks again Outside Loop), 3dfx Voodoo5 AGP Graphics Card , Kenwood 72X CDROM,
Win 98SE, DirectX 7.0a

Benchmarks With i815E Pro
Straight up performance

We'll start with some SiSoft Sandra scores.

CPU @ 933

Multimedia @ 933

Memory @ 133MHz. FSB

Drive Performance @ 933

CPU @ 1.015 GHz.

Memory 145MHz. FSB

 

These numbers show the MS-6337 behind the Abit SE6 by a slight margin in every test.  This seems a little strange but notice the clock speed shown in the CPU scores.  Sandra is reporting 931MHz. which is not the exact clock speed we designated.  This is indicative of the slightly more "relaxed" timing characteristics of the MSI board.  This may have added to its excellent stability but is robbing it of a small bit of performance.

Now for the ZD's Content Creation Winstone 2000 test.

Neck and neck performance is shown here which was to be expected with two boards boasting such similar specifications.  What is somewhat surprising is that the MS-6337 edges out the SE6 even though the Sandra scores don't correlate with that.  Regardless, the numbers are so close that they are within a certain margin of error in the test.

For a more extensive and detailed break down of the numbers, we have ZD's Winbech 99 Version 1.1 scores.

Click for full view

Once again, these two competitors are side by side in performance, although the MS-6337 is just a step behind the SE6.  These numbers are more in keeping with what we saw in the Sandra tests.  All told however, this is great performance from the i815 based MS-6337.  It is amazing to see just how good the ATA100 interface really is on these boards.  Months ago we were only seeing RAID or SCSI setups cranking out this level of throughput.

 

Let's call it a day here and tell you our final verdict on the MS-6337.  For starters, the MS-6337 has the best BIOS Menu we have seen to date.  Its level of "tweakability" is fantastic.  Even the most demanding power user will have plenty to explore with this board and its potential for over-clocking success and new levels of performance is excellent.

There were a few setbacks that will cause us to issue a less than perfect rating here, including the existing bug that is in the BIOS with respect to voltage adjustments and the slightly lower benchmark scores due to more conservative timings of this board.  However, as we all know a BIOS can be revised and the lower benchmark numbers were marginal at best.  Furthermore, the slightly relaxed timings of the MS-6337 may well have contributed to the excellent overall stability that we experienced with this board.

We're giving the MSI MS-6337 a HotHardware Heat Meter Rating of....

 

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