| Product: |
MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R |
| Date: |
07/02/05 (874 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: comes with everything, reliable, good quality
Disadvantages: Via chipset, runs a bit warm.
For a long time I thought a motherboard was just a motherboard - something that you plug a processor and a few cards into to get a computer to work. Granted an important component, but I used to think brand didn't matter.
Motherboards are annoying - every time a standard changes in the computer world, or you want to upgrade your processor, you will probably have to change your motherboard too.
But that was many years ago when computers weren't really gaming machines - these days though there are many reasons to pick a good motherboard, and, unfortunately, more bad boards than good.
There are some makes, like PC Chips, that will always be Budget with a capital B. Some, like Gigabyte, that offer staid reliability and stability, and others, like MSI, that are just PURE quality.
I've had a few MSI boards, and they have all been reliable, stable, fast, well built, and complete packages. This is one of the first boards they made to support a 64 bit processor.
The chances are, unfortunately, that if you have only recently bought a AMD 64 processor, you won't need this board.
The problem is, for all this is a good board, it takes the AMD 64 socket 754 chips. Newer AMD 64 chips are socket 939, which means that it is a different shape, with pins and gaps in different places. The newer chips simply won't fit in there.
If you do happen to buy one of the socket 754 chips though, then this is one of the best boards out there that will take them.
In terms of features, well, this board is loaded with them. You get four USB ports, so you can use plenty of USB devices without the need of an extra hub, plus a Gigabit ethernet connector for nice fast home networking, your usual keyboard / mouse / printer connection, onboard sound just in case you don't have a sound card, and onboard graphics.
On top of this, you get good old fashioned IDE hard drive connectors and a floppy connector, plus the posh new SATA (Serial ATA) connectors which can be used either just to connect compatible drives normally, or can also be set up as a RAID array for extra performance and data security.
You can use both the normal IDE drives and the SATA drives at the same time, so you can have a lot of drives installed in your computer pretty easily.
The onboard graphics and sound can both be disabled in the bios, which is a bonus, since if you have a system good enough to be using this board, the chances are you will already have a good graphics and sound setup. If you don't, however, I would say that the on board sound is actually fairly good, so you could save a few pounds by using it instead of upgrading your sound card.
This board comes with some extra brackets and connectors, including bluetooth and firewire, so you have lots of options for connectivity if you want them. You screw these in to the blanking plates so you would be loosing a PCI slot or two if you used these, but they are optional. In my case I just left them off. You also get lots of cables for connecting IDE and SATA drives, and a spare case back plate. The connectors are rounded for better airflow and conveniently labelled so you plug the hard drives in the right way round.
The biggest drawback of this system from a gamers perspective is that it has the Via chipset instead of the more preferable NForce one from nVidia. Even so performance on this is pretty good, so unless you want to get the highest results in every benchmark I wouldn't worry about it too much.
The board is littered with heatsinks, which are all necessary from what I can tell - it tends to run at between 40 and 50 degrees in my rather cramped but fairly well ventilated case. I've heard reports of it running lower if you have lots of case fans, but for those not into modding it is a little warm.
As you would expect, this supports 8X AGP. You also get three DDR memory slots, which can take up to 2GB of DDR 400, although you can put older DDR in as well. This is a bit of a shame really as the chipset on this board can actually use up to 4GB, but the board itself limits you.
The BIOS has lots of options for tweaking performance in terms of both graphics, memory and the processor. The version you get straight out of the shops though is very old, and I would recommend an update right away.
In terms of software, you get quite a lot with this - the usual drivers and chipset updates, a 'Live Monitor' utility, which will check for updates at a specified time and download them for you, and a utility called 'Core Center'
The Live Update program is pretty intelligent as far as this kind of thing goes. It usually recommends the right updates, and hasn't made any critical errors with Bios flashes yet. I wish I could say the same about other companies update software.
Core Center is MSIs utility to check on the temperature of your processor, the case temperature, the speed of any fans, and the voltage being sent to the processor. Core Center also allows you to overclock computer by changing the FSB (Front Side Bus) and processor speeds. You can either do this by hand or just click a button and have the program do it for you. If you choose the later then the method it uses isn't very elegant!
The program will keep ticking up in small percentage increments until you either tell it to stop, or the computer crashes. If it crashes, then it will reboot at normal speed, and inform you what speed it got to before it crashed, offering you the option of setting to that speed or not.
I've only used this function a couple of times as I prefer not to overclock, but you can get a decent speed increase from it, and most of the time things run stable and not too much hotter.
I've had this board a fair while now - about a year, and in that time there has only been one problem with it - one of the serial ATA connectors snapped - it still works since it was only the outer plastic clip that snapped, but the connection is now very loose. This was probably down to user error, as I was rather rough with it when trying to remove one of the connectors, but they are quite fragile due to their small size.
To give credit where it is due however, I have been a lot rougher with the rest of the board, and the other connections are all intact, whereas I have even managed to break the AGP port of some other makes.
To conclude, this is a good board, one of the best for the type of processor it can take. The Via chipset may not offer the absolute best performance, but it comes very close to nForce at a slightly lower price, and the board is loaded with features. MSI have taken care to give you everything you could possibly need, and, more importantly everything works!
I'd recommend this more for gamers than for people who are looking for a quick and dirty upgrade to their web / word processing machine - if that's all you want there are slightly cheaper boards that don't have as many un-wanted extras, and are probably easier to set up.
It's unfortunate that the newer versions of this board, that take the more modern processors are so hard to get, otherwise I'd be a proud owner of one of them too.
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