MSI - MSI K8N Neo Platinum Review

MSI scored a winner with their implementation of the nForce 3 250Gb as we’ve seen here today. Although we received a late production sample of the board, it was very polished and rock solid throughout testing. Certainly, from an enthusiast standpoint, the K8N Neo Platinum is more suited for the tweaking we wished we were able to do with pretty much all K8T800 boards.. ..Performance was excellent, besting the VIA K8T800 in almost every application benchmark. We have also seen that in many cases, there were large gaps in performance, rather than a percentage point here and there. This is quite an accomplishment for a new chipset, though it can be argued that NVIDIA used the nForce 3 Pro 150 as the guinea pig to work out the kinks.

..Regarding the onboard peripherals, all of the components included with the K8N Neo are what I would categorize as acceptable. I was very impressed with the networking aspect of the board, but less so with the audio, as the mic-in was very poor. There is no 3rd party SATA controller, but the board does provide SATA RAID support. The great thing about the nForce 3 250Gb is when you’re using the SATA as a single drive controller, you do not need a driver disk during Windows setup for it to be recognized. As somebody who packed away his floppy drive ages ago, the fact that the K8T800 requires a driver disk for SATA was an exercise in frustration. Kudos to NVIDIA for getting around this inconvenience.

Pros: Excellent stability, great performance, NVIDIA Firewall, PCI/AGP locks.
Cons: Decent but not great OC experiences. Mic-in issues.
Bottom Line: If you’ve been holding out on the Athlon 64, particularly the more consumer based Socket 754 version, the K8N Neo Platinum is as good a reason as any to jump on board now. With the great performance, stability and system level firewall, you won’t be disappointed with it.

MSI K8N Neo Platinum @ Viper Lair