MS-7053

The Micro-Star International (MSI) Corporation manufactured the MS-7053 motherboard, also known as MSI 925XE Neo Platinum, in 2004. It supports the Intel Pentium 4 Prescott CPU in LGA775 socket, and a front-side bus (FSB) speed of 1066 MHz. It has a dual-channel memory architecture including the Intel ICH6/ICH6R chipset. Although it is difficult to get Windows 7 drivers for the chipset, I was able to find ones that worked well.

I thought this was an interesting board because it has an integrated VIA6410 IDE Raid chipset, which provides two Ultra DMA 66/100/133 IDE Controllers for connecting up to four PATA drives in RAID configurations. It also has a Serial ATA 150 controller integrated in the Intel ICH6/ICH6R chipset, which enables you to connect four SATA drives in a RAID matrix. I just wanted to experiment to see how fast Windows 7 could boot using four drives in RAID 0 mode.

I bought this board second-hand for a few bucks on eBay, and it came with a CPU cooling fan, and 3.6 GHz CPU. Some of the capacitors had bulged, so I decided to order some replacements for soldering later. I decided to remove all the heatsinks, because they were not making proper thermal connection. I also stripped the heatsink and fan assembly for cleaning as the dust had clogged it up.

These are the photographs after it was all cleaned and assembled. The PC case had a special chassis tray at the side, which slides out so you can mount the motherboard onto it properly.

In this build, I am using the Gigabyte GV-N84s-512i graphics card, which I also managed to find cheaply on eBay. At one time, these cards were extremely good for games but today gamers tend to go for the more high-end stuff, which is just as well as it is fine for simple desktop applications.

This is the Intel 925XE chipset, which requires a good heatsink. The motherboard also has a socket for connecting an optional chipset fan to keep it cool.

This board is ideal for fitting into a large case that has at least eight drive bays. Unfortunately, the case I have only has space for four drive bays, but it is good enough.

The plastic locking tabs for the LGA775 heatsink and fan assembly were broken so I had no choice but to replace them all with nut and bolt. If you do that then you will have to use plastic washers on the reverse side.

I decided to use these thick plastic washers with a felt layer to protect the PCB traces.

This is a LGA775 socket motherboard.

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