abit I-N73HD and MSI P6NGM (NVIDIA GeForce 71ġġ)
Layout and Features
Both the motherboards are built on the Micro-ATX form factor, so they are of compact size. The abit board is a bit bigger.
Apart from the integrated graphic core GeForce 7150/7100, the boards allow for using an external video card installed into the PCI Express x16 slot.
The configuration of the remaining slots is identical for both the motherboards: each board uses two PCI slots and one PCI Express x16 slot.
To cool the chipset, both the motherboards use only an aluminum radiator.
Both the motherboards have two 240-pin DIMM slots each for DDR2 memory modules, with the overall supported memory capacity being 4 GB.
The basic expansion options of motherboards based on GeForce 7150 and 7100 chipsets are absolutely identical because of the same nForce 630i south bridge. In particular, the chipset supports four SerialATA II links, with the option to arrange RAID arrays of levels 0, 1, 0+1, and 5. At the same time, there is support for one ParallelATA link.
Then, the motherboards support 10 USB 2.0 ports each. Four of them are installed on the rear panel, with 6 more ports connected through headers (missing in the package bundle). Besides, both the boards use a Firewire controller. On the abit board, that is the TSB43AB22A chip made by Texas Instruments, and on the MSI board - JMB381 by JMicron. Therefore, the boards offer support for 2 Firewire ports: one mounted on the rear panel, with the other one being additional (no bracket in the package bundle).
Also, the two boards implement the High Definition Audio subsystem, with the ALC888 chip is used as the codec.
Now a few words on the network support. The MSI board uses a high-speed network controller (Gigabit Ethernet) RTL8211BL made by Realtek, and abit - Marvell 88E1116:
The board's rear panel is of the following configuration:
Except the difference in positioning of the connectors layout, the functionality is almost the same. The only difference is in that the abit board has an optical SP-DIF. On the other hand, the MSI board supports one COM port, but it is implemented with a bracket (missing in the package bundle).
Here is the traditional layout of the board:
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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VGA Card:
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CPU & Memory:
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