MSI 915GLM-V Motherboard 

MSI 915GLM-V motherboard is based on Intel 915GL chipset. It's also meant for regular office users. It supports P4s on an LGA 775 socket. The motherboard has two DIMM slots that can take up to 2 GB of DDR 400 RAM. It has 800/533 MHz front side bus (FSB). The board has one AGR 8X slot for only listed and compatible AGP VGA cards. The compatible card list is provided in the manual. This limits your graphics choice. In fact, it didn't recognize our Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card, which we used to test all other motherboards. It has all the regular features like onboard 10/100 Mbps Ethernet, a whopping and ample 8 USB 2.0, 4 SATA ports, 2 PCI slots and a CNR slot. Plus, this one only has a single IDE connector, whereas the ECS and nForce offer two. This board did have a better 5.1 channel audio as compared to the 2.1 in the other two. Plus, it also had an integrated Intel graphics system. Moreover, this board also has SATA RAID support for levels 0, 1, and 1.5. 



We tested this board with a P4 3.6 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, and 7200 rpm hard drive. Since it refused to work with our graphics card, we had to test it with its own onboard graphics. to our surprise, this resulted in the highest Sysmark04 score of 149 among all other boards reviewed this time. It had a large lead in the Internet content creation benchmark, scoring a cool 179, while a small lead in the office productivity part of the tests in Sysmark 2004, with a score of 127. 

Bottom Line:

Overall, this board gives excellent performance over the other two, in its league although we suggest you to be wary of the external graphics support. Plus of course, the few extra features come for a much higher price. If you don't mind paying that extra for that extra performance, then go for this board. 

Anubhav Verma