MSI - MSI K7N2 Delta2 Platinum nForce2 Ultra 400Gb Motherboard Review

Today we look at a high end Athlon XP motherboard from MSI. Based on nVidia’s latest nForce2 chipset it promises excellent performance. While speed wise nothing much was improved, the feature set of the nForce2 Ultra 400 Gb is what it is really all about.

Gigabit LAN, Serial ATA and RAID are the main feature additions to this new chipset, allowing the Athlon XP platform to be on par with the latest A64 and P4 motherboards. MSI’s implementation carries the name “Platinum”, it is their top of the line motherboard series which is feature rich, comes with a black PCB and offers a 3-year warranty!

. . .The latest (and maybe last) nVidia chipset for the Athlon XP makes a great platform for any budget minded gamer or hardware enthusiast. MSI’s implementation gives you a motherboard with a good layout and with the integration of their CoreCell chip offers the end user quite some tweaking possibilities.

The Platinum version of this board is the “Deluxe” of MSI’s line-up with onboard Gigabit, RAID, SATA and Firewire support. It is quite a disappointment to see the SoundStorm audio controller missing from the nForce2 Ultra 400Gb chip, instead we have the well know AC97 chip which offers 5.1 Channel H/W audio, the K7N2 Delta2 Platinum offers 6 channel analog output as well as digital SPDIF out signal.

For the hardware enthusiast who’s not into overclocking I can heartily recommend this motherboard as long as you don’t use a CPU heatsink that requires mounting holes around the socket, if you are someone who tends to push hardware to the limit, you might find the MSI lacking in the FSB department.

MSI K7N2 Delta2 Platinum Athlon XP nForce2 Review @ MADSHRIMPS