MSI - MSI K8N Neo nForce3 250Gb Motherboard Review

The K8N Neo is the latest board in MSI’s Athlon64 based lineup. The board itself is built upon the single chip nForce3 250Gb chipset, and supports the AMD Athlon64 754-pin processors, in addition to PC3200 DDR RAM operating in Single Channel mode only. The K8N Neo is feature complete right out of the box, requiring the minimum of components to function such as processor, RAM, video card, and drives. The following components are integrated in to the motherboard: 2 IDE ATA-133 ports; 4 SATA-150 ports; 8 USB 2.0 capable ports (4 in rear panel, and 2 onboard headers supporting 2 ports each); 3 IEEE 1394 capable ports (1 in rear panel, and 2 onboard headers supporting 1 port each); NVIDIA chipset integrated Gigabit Ethernet; Realtek 8 channel audio codec featuring S/PDIF output ports; on-board support for the D-Bracket2 diagnostic LED display; and serial, parallel, and PS/2 port support.

…Overall the MSI K8N NEO was a pleasure to work with and extremely fast to use. From what I have seen, I have no problems with recommending the MSI K8N NEO to your short list when shopping for Athlon64 motherboards. I can see many enthusiasts basing their 754-pin systems on the K8N NEO as MSI has simply put together a great product for that market segment. I would suggest reading a couple of retail reviews when the board makes it to market soon in order to be assured that the fine tuning has been done. In short I think MSI has a winner on their hands. I can wait to see this chipset on a 939-pin board with some 90nm AMD silicon behind it!

MSI K8N Neo @ HardOCP