MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI Motherboard

MSI has been very good to me with customer care.

Strengths: Good for upgrading.

Weakness: I've had none.

Purchased in April 2005 for use with AMD 3500&MSI6600gt,purchased 2nd one in June 2005 my 2nd build was held up,in the meantime AMD Dual core became affordable for me my mother board did not have the two stickers on the box that say Dual Core or 7800.If you go to MSI site you can upgrade this board for free(minus money to ship it to them).they say they will go that extra mile when they do it what...
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Purchased in April 2005 for use with AMD 3500&MSI6600gt,purchased 2nd one in June 2005 my 2nd build was held up,in the meantime AMD Dual core became affordable for me my mother board did not have the two stickers on the box that say Dual Core or 7800.If you go to MSI site you can upgrade this board for free(minus money to ship it to them).they say they will go that extra mile when they do it what ever that means.It takes them three business days(that held true for me).Fear not if you already have your computer put together they tell you how to do it yourself.Purchased thru ZipZoomFly.

By chipn66 - Oct 9, 2005

This board has been very stable. I...

Strengths: Nice layout of ports, SLI, SATA RAID, 6 SATA ports.

Weakness: Loud chipset fan.

This board has been very stable. I have a A64 3500+ with 1GB DDR PC3200 and am not overclocking. I replaced another brand board that kept crashing and this one is holding up very nicely. It was easy to configure hardware and software for SLI. RAM slots are placed in direction of air flow in the case. The internal ports are well placed in relation to floppy, optical drives, and hard drives. Make...
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This board has been very stable. I have a A64 3500+ with 1GB DDR PC3200 and am not overclocking. I replaced another brand board that kept crashing and this one is holding up very nicely. It was easy to configure hardware and software for SLI. RAM slots are placed in direction of air flow in the case. The internal ports are well placed in relation to floppy, optical drives, and hard drives. Make sure to get a PSU with a 24-pin connector (not the 20- to 24-pin adapter).

My only complaint is the northbridge fan is too loud (spins at ~6000rpm). I got a Zalman Fan Mate 2 and slowed it down to just the right level of quietness.

By jeff777 - Apr 28, 2005

I haven't done SLI with this board...

Strengths: Feature rich

Weakness: None

I haven't done SLI with this board yet, but as far as the NForce4 features are concerned, this board has implemented them really well. Driver installation was no problem and everything Just Works. Previously, I had gone with Asus but the Anandtech message boards convinced me to try MSI for the first time, and I don't regret it.

By docmaven - Apr 19, 2005

Great overclocking AMD board

Strengths: Lots of BIOS overclocking options; 4 DIMM slots; dual SATA RAID controllers; dual Gigabit controllers; great component placement; 24-bit Creative Live onboard sound

Weakness: Noisy northbridge chipset fan

Best AMD SLI motherboard except maybe the DFI LanParty SLI. This board has an amazing feature set. Unfortunately some of the features turn out to be not so valuable, such as the Core Cell auto-overclocking, dual Gigabit (the nVidia Gigabit controller has crummy software and causes blue screens for a lot of ppl, so I just use the Marvell controller only), and some of the included MSI in-house...
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Best AMD SLI motherboard except maybe the DFI LanParty SLI. This board has an amazing feature set. Unfortunately some of the features turn out to be not so valuable, such as the Core Cell auto-overclocking, dual Gigabit (the nVidia Gigabit controller has crummy software and causes blue screens for a lot of ppl, so I just use the Marvell controller only), and some of the included MSI in-house software (DigiCell, Core Center, etc). I found that for the best overclocking you pretty much have to disable any and all auto-overclocking functions in the BIOS and NOT use the Core Center overclocking/monitoring software. Once back to standard manual overclocking, this board is an overclocking beast. My Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz) is O/C'd to 2.5Ghz so far and the system is rock stable under Prime95 stress testing for hours on end. The northbridge chipset fan was noisy from day one. It sounded like it had sand or rocks in its bearings while spinning at 6000-7000 rpm. I replaced it with a Zalman northbridge heatsink (model# ZM-NB47J) and I'm loving it. The only problem is that the northbridge chip is located directly behind the 2nd PCI-X SLI slot. So if you ever go SLI, you're stuck either using the noisy (but low-profile) stock chipset fan, or somehow modding an aftermarket chipset fan to clear the graphics card. The 8-channel onboard Creative Live chip is awesome and SO much better than any other onboard sound chip. MSI LiveUpdate software is clunky but works great for making sure you've got all the latest drivers and bios updates installed. Overall, I highly recommend this board for any Athlon 64 system in need of SLI.

By hotshotscott - Oct 10, 2005

I got this board up and going with...

Strengths: Good board, stability, OCs moderately

Weakness: Sound is a bit muddy to me, Woud like to have OCed better with, Requires very strong PSU

I got this board up and going with a 3000+ winchster cpu and let me tell you at stock settings this bad boy is really stable and fast. Like i said the sound is generally great but a bit muddy for me and since its the live version you cant control bass or trebel, tho its much better than other built in sound cards. I got my 3000+ chip with this board to 255x9 with very little voltage increases. If...
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I got this board up and going with a 3000+ winchster cpu and let me tell you at stock settings this bad boy is really stable and fast. Like i said the sound is generally great but a bit muddy for me and since its the live version you cant control bass or trebel, tho its much better than other built in sound cards. I got my 3000+ chip with this board to 255x9 with very little voltage increases. If you need a sli board take a look you wont be dissapointed.

By pasta1234 - Mar 6, 2005