jmke

Yet another company announced its RADEON 9100 IGP mainboard this week – Microstar International. The company positions its MSI RS3M as a solution for home and office use and surprisingly declares availability of SURROUNDVIEW technology, a feature that ATI disabled a while ago because of driver absence.

Just like the majority of other RADEON 9100 IGP-based mainboards, MSI’s RS3M is a microATX offering with rather conservative set of capabilities to provide basic functionality for cost-effective PCs.

MSI’s RS3M set of features looks as follows:

Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4/Celeron processors with 400/533/800MHz Quad Pumped Bus with up to 3.40GHz clock-speed and above;
Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
ATI RADEON 91000 IGP chipset with ATI IXP150 I/O controller;
2 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory. Dual-channel memory bus support: the memory modules should be identical and installed in pairs;
3 PCI slots, 1 CNR slot and 1 AGP 8x slot;
Integrated RADEON 9100 IGP graphics core with DirectX 8.1 support;
D-Sub, TV-Out connectors;
2-channel Parallel ATA-33/66/100 integrated controller;
6 USB 2.0 ports;
2 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports;
10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter from Realtek;
6-channel AC’97 audio solution;
Additional functions found on all present mainboards from MSI, such as: Live Update 3, Live BIOS, Live Driver, Live VGA BIOS, Live VGA Driver and Live Utility;
microATX Form Factor.
Microstar International rather unexpectedly advertises SURROUNDVIEW technology – a feature that allows ATI RADEON 9100 IGP-based system to work with up to three displays when an additional AGP graphics card is installed and integrated core is functional. Currently ATI does not provide any drivers for this capability and presently available mainboards do not sport SURROUNDVIEW. However, since MSI discusses the technology now, it may mean that ATI may finally release the driver that would allow using three displays using cost-effective hardware.

Pricing and availability details about RS3M were not announced.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainboa...129100830.html

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