MSI - MSI K8N Neo-FIS2R Platinum nForce3 250Gb Motherboard Review

Colin Sun takes a look at the MSI K8N Neo-FIS2R Platinum nForce3 250Gb motherboard over at PC Stats:

Now, almost a year after 64-bit AMD Athlon64 processor was introduced, we’re getting a taste of nVIDIA’s new nForce3-250Gb chipset. It comes care of the very well equipped MSI K8N Neo Platinum motherboard which is based on this latest nVidia chipset. In terms of goodies, the K8N Neo-FIS2R Platinum boasts onboard native Serial ATA/RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE 1394, an onboard 7.1 audio controller and of course, MSI’s well known “CoreCell technology.” We’ll dive deeper into the technology behind the NF3-250Gb a bit later in the article.

…The MSI K8N Neo-FIS2R Platinum is an excellent board to work with and is fully loaded too. The layout of the board is great and really the only thing that irks me about the board is the placement of Serial ATA slots one and two. The NF3-250Gb now has the fastest HyperTransport links of all the competition, nVIDIA’s solution runs at 1 GHz and is 16 bits wide both up and downstream. In theory that means that the NF3-250 should be able to get data to and from the processor and the various other devices quicker than the competition. While that’s great, in reality it really does not do much for desktop applications yet.

In the end, the performance of the MSI K8N Neo-FIS2R Platinum motherboard was excellent. It’s easily the fastest Athlon64 board we’ve tested to date. The benchmarks improved even further when we used a nVIDIA based videocard, but even when with a Radeon 9800XT, performance remains very nice indeed. The board is not in the retail channels just yet so we’re not sure how much it costs, but MSI usually price their products aggressively. If you’re an AMD Athlon64 user, make sure you check out the MSI K8N Neo-FIS2R Platinum motherboard! It’s based on the nForce3-250Gb chipset, and it is fast and full of the features you need!

MSI K8N Neo-FIS2R Platinum NF3-250Gb Motherboard Review @ PC Stats