Microstar MS-6905 Dual CPU Converter Board Review
Reviewed by CPU-zilla
Date : 18th August 1999

Introduction

Well, a first look at this review and most of you must be wondering why this product was brought out so late from the reviews lab. First, Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter cards are still widely used as a lot of users still go for the relatively cheap Socket-370 Celeron processors. There are quite a number of DIY enthusiasts that still ask the question as to which is the best converter card to get. Secondly, there are a lot of renewed interests in the field of overclocking since the re-introduction of the Celeron 300A and also some reports of successes in overclocking the Celeron 366A up to 550MHz. Thirdly, this is no ordinary converter as it allows you to do SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing) on your favourite Celeron processors. With this in mind, we had no choice but to get our hands on a Slot-1 dual CPU motherboard to test out this seemingly un-important feature.

Normally, most reviews would include some benchmark numbers or some form of tests. However, in this case, there's absolutely nothing beneficial to test in order to bring out the true colours of this converter card. Because of this, I intend to just give you 10 reasons, why you should or should not get this converter card. Most people call it a riser card, Slotket or Slotkey, but I think the last name is very likely to be a case of bad spelling. Anyway, let's depart from all the usual benchmarking for once and have a look at my list.

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The 10 Reasons

No.	10 reasons why you should	10 reasons why you should NOT
1.	You have a Slot-1 board and do not have enough money to upgrade to a faster Pentium II/III processor.	Your parents just gave you a large sum of money out of the blue, and you intend to get a Slot-1 processor.
2.	You intend to do overclocking on your Socket-370 processor but your Slot-1 board does not have voltage tweaking.	You hate the thought of stressing your processor by overclocking. You co-founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Processors (SPCP).
3.	You intend to get one of those expensive Slot-1 dual processor boards but ran out of budget to purchase two Slot-1 processors. Thus, you want to only do dual processing on two fast Celerons.	You do not believe the potential of Celerons in dual processing applications due to the lack in cache.
4.	Because the Microstar converter board is superbly made with overclocking and SMP features.	You can't seem to find any other converter cards that allows both overclocking and SMP features.
5.	Because the board was carefully designed with a lot of considerations put in to ensure constant trace lengths between the processor and Slot-1 connector. This increases both stability and compatibility across most, if not all, motherboards. <click here to see a close-up of those constant trace lines>	You doubt the capability of Socket-370 converter boards as you think it increases the distance between the CPU and the motherboard chipset, thus rendering the entire motherboard design to go out of spec.
6.	You think it is worth spending a couple of bucks more for a feature packed product, although there are cheaper alternatives in the market.	The price is too high. You'd rather save that few bucks so that you can buy yourself a plate of chicken rice at the food court below Sim Lim Square.
7.	You like the way the converter board looks in your system.	The converter board does not sit well on your motherboard's Slot-1 retention mechanism, and you think your processor might fall of when you mount your system upside-down on the ceiling.
8.	You can use cheap Socket-7 heatsink and fans and save yourself enough cash to buy a processor with higher speed grade.	You do not believe that the relatively smaller heatsink with one single fan is good enough to cool the processor. You prefer larger heatsinks found on Slot-1 processors.
9.	You think investing in a Socket-370 board is a waste of money since it does not hold much future in the upgrade path.	You have one of the ECS boards with the Gemini architecture (which has both Slot-1 and Socket-370), and you'd be crazy to use this card on a board already equipped with a Socket-370 connector.
10.	You think CPU-zilla's "why you should" reasons stated above are absolutely true.	You think CPU-zilla's "why you should NOT" reasons stated above are absolutely true.

I guess that's about all the reasons I could think of, although I have to say, some are really not applicable. :)

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The Test

In the test, I decided to install BeOS Release 4 instead of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, since I find it extremely boring to show the SMP capability using NT. I thought why not spice things up a little with something less known to make this review more interesting, and I did. Well, let's see how multi-processing actually looks like in BeOS.

	Over here, we can see that BeOS have successfully identified the processor that was actually installed in the system, and it even reported the correct speed too. I ran the GL Teapot demo and made it display some really complex geometric shapes in order to make the CPUs work like a horse. Note that since the TNT card was not yet supported in this older release, all rendering was performed by software.
	There's this neat feature where you can choose to disable one of the processor. Here, I've chose to disable CPU 2. I must say this is a cool feature indeed.
	Hmmmm... seems like I'd prefer to run on CPU 2 instead. All this was done rather seamlessly and the OS ran beautifully. I'm beginning to love BeOS.

I guess that's about as much as I can show you. The converter board worked fine, and in my tests, stability was not an issue. I've even managed to test it on several other boards, and found it to work without any problems, although I can't claim that it is fully compatible with all Slot-1 boards. Still, this is a pretty straight forward piece of board, and I really don't expect any problems arising from it.

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Conclusion

I must say that Microstar has done it again. Although this is a fairly simple card, we can see that they have put in quite a lot of effort to ensure stability and compatibility with as many motherboards as possible. In addition, they have placed emphasis on delivering a quality product packed with enough features to make every tweaker happy. It is certainly not surprising to see the maker of the famous MS-6163 come out with yet another wonderful product. Although I was never a Microstar fan, I have to say that I'm impressed with the way they churn out great products like these. That's well done indeed, Microstar!!

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