MTech R540/R541 TX Socket-7 Board

Motherboard Specifications

The Good

Figure 1. MTech R541

Both the 541 and the 540 place their memory expansion slots in the lower right hand corner of the motherboard itself making installing/upgrading your RAM a tedious task in some cramped cases. MTech provides you with a hearty 4 PCI and 4ISA slots with both TX board, however the large heatsinks on the voltage regulators (4 on the 541 and 3 on the 540) prevent full length ISA cards from populating 3 of the 4 ISA slots.  MTech included core voltage settings on the R54x ranging from 2.1v to 3.4v in 0.1v increments to make this much more of a flexible motherboard.

The MIG 541's jumper setup is completely documented in MTech's thorough manual which also includes the classic, MTech Quick Reference Card, for on-the-fly tweaking. The R540 on the other hand uses a few sets of dip switches as an alternative to jumpers for its configuration. The R540's manual is just as thorough as that of the 541 and also covers all dip switch settings for all of the supported bus speeds, officially and unofficially (60 - 83.3MHz). Included in MTech's package are the standard set of IDE/FDD cables in addition to the Intel BMIDE drivers.

Both successors to MTech's MIG R539, the 541 & R540 corrected many problems the original 539 posed. The 75MHz bus speed setting, fully documented in both the manual of the 541 and the 540 is now rock solid with AMD's K6, Intel's Pentium MMX, or Cyrix's 6x86MX (the 3 processors used in the tests). Unfortunately that is the end of the Good section of the R541/540 review...want to know why? Keep reading...

The Bad

The good section of this review started out by talking about the layout of the motherboard and that is how the bad section will start out. The MTech R541, like its predecessor, features a highly uncommon and complicated jumper setup. The jumper blocks are difficult to set for a first time builder. It is usually good practice to equip a motherboard with at least enough jumpers for every setting to be theoretically achievable without having to buy more jumper caps. This practice doesn't seem to have been instated with the R541 since setting the board to 83.3MHz x 2.5 requires the use of one more un-supplied jumper cap. The bottom line? Have the manual ready and a few spare jumper caps handy when setting up the R541. I should mention that the R540 with its dip switch driven setup doesn't provide these problems. While MTech may have fixed the stability of the 2 boards at the 75MHz bus speed, the 83.3MHz setting on the R541/540 remaining virtually inoperable. So don't plan on doing any remotely serious overclocking with either of these two.