MSI RS350 Motherboard 

The MSI RS350 has been specially designed for the Indian market. So you may not even find this motherboard listed on MIS's website. It's a MicroATX form factor motherboard that's based on a new chipset from ATI called RS350. Its feature set includes support up to 4 GB DDR memory and dual channel configuration, AGP 8X interface, integrated 5.1 channel audio, eight USB 2.0 ports, and two SerialATA ports, which can be

configured in RAID 0,1 levels. Plus, it has the usual serial and parallel ports, a 10/100 LAN port, and audio jacks. It supports Front Side Bus speeds of 800/533/400 MHz .

There are several optional features that the board supports. These include

FireWire, Wake On LAN, and Gigabit Ethernet. It can even come with an optional TV-Out port. 

We tested the board with a P4 3.2 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM. It supports socket 478 CPUs. We tested it with its

onboard Radeon 9100 pro IGP graphics chipset as well as with an external graphics card, for which we used a Gigabyte FX5900XT with 128 MB of video

memory.

The board's performance stands nowhere compared to the PCI-Express based RS480. The RS480 beats it hands down with more than double the scores in almost all benchmarks. Moreover, the RS480 is only Rs 2K more expensive than the RS350, which is not much considering that you get PCI-Express support with it. But if you're price conscious and need a board that supports P4, which can be used for regular office productivity, then this is a suitable choice. 

Bottom Line: While the board comes with a good onboard graphics chipset, its overall performance isn't

very impressive. However, considering the price and supported features, it's a good buy. 

Ankit Kawatra