I continue with the tests of the motherboards, but it is not the A-Trend ATC-2000, which is still at the top of the list of those to try, I tried instead an S.370 with Celeron 500 MHz, precisely an MSI MS6178 VER:1.0, Intel i810 chipset (unfortunately not i810E), the format is uATX with three PCI slots and an AMR, next to that AMR there is a second AMR called PTI, honestly it might look like a kind of AGP, in reality it is not!

To make a long story short, I installed a 16 MB SDRAM, a new battery and connected the ATX power supply and keyboard and monitor cables, in short, I gave power and it started!!!

The BIOS is AWARD, dated 05/12/1999, from the first BIOS screen you can read that the integrated VGA uses 1 MB of memory, maybe a little but for normal use it could be more than enough, unlike the i815 it cannot be disabled, but you could perhaps add a second PCI VGA, if the main one is not enough.

I've already made some benches, and soon I'll publish the results, I'll probably increase the RAM to 128 MB or more, regarding the CPU, I don't think it can be updated with Coppermine, but in this regard I have to do some investigations, maybe who knows, we'll see!

Still with the MSI MS6178, I did a little investigation, just to see if overclocking is possible (slight maybe), and what I found makes me think that, excluding the limits due to the chipset, it is possible to select other frequencies, some even interesting.

At least on paper 🃏, it promises well, but from the BIOS it could be a completely different story, the one on the MB is an AWARD first version (V1.0), there are later versions, and the most recent one should be V2.1, there is also an AMI BIOS that could be loaded, but I don't think it can be better, currently from the settings present, you can go up with the FSB to 75 or 83 MHz, of course I would avoid the highest value, and I will limit myself to selecting 75 instead of 66, this will give me over 60 MHz of frequency more, and we'll see how much it would earn after the various bench (Phil's included) DOS.

Before doing this, I have already changed the SDRAM, I put a 256 MB one, a bit exaggerated for a PC like that, but enough to be able to load Windows 2000 or XP, the only thing that could bother, is that the triple count becomes quite slow, apart from this that in any case it can be skipped, now there is also too much memory, and except in special cases, it should not be necessary to add more.

On the results of the bench I will make a summary later, for now it is possible to preview Speedsys 4.78, the other benches have not all been completed yet, but I need some time to conclude them, I will see later to load Windows, and also do benches from there.