Advantages: Easy to install, reliable and cheap for such a high quality product. Disadvantages: Oddly placed FDD header
The MSI K9N Neo-F
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I've never written a motherboard review before so I hope I cover everything you need to know.
AVAILABILITY:
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This item should be in the £40-£50 price range.
It is I would consider a higher mid range board.
Specs:
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ATX
This is an ATX sized motherboard. It will fit in midi or full sized tower cases. It will not fit in mini ATX cases.
Processor = SOCKET AM2
This is a Socket AM2 motherboard.
For: AMD ATHLON 64's, Semprons And Athlon dual cores aka X2's.
RAM = DDR2
This board supports the 240 pin DDR 2 standard. It will take PC4200 PC5300 & PC6400 sticks of ram.
PCIE Graphics.
This will take a PCIE x16 Graphics card. It will not work with AGP cards. PCIE is the more recent technology.
Chipset ...
I purchased this board as my first foray into Core2Duo boards. As I was initially using it with the Pentium D range of processors, and knew it would be a great upgrade option.
My review will focus on the use of this board and the new Core2Duo processors, to emphasise it's features.
The board's first strong point is that it supports a wide range of Processors, starting from the Celeron D series, through the Dual Core Pentium D Series (Excluding the 820) and then finally the current jewel of Intel, the Core2Duo Processor Range. All of these processors are in the Socket 775 format, making it easy to buy a processor according to your budget. With FSB (Front side bus) speed up to 1066mhz the CPU choices are vast.
Another great feature of the P965 Neo-F is the support of DDR2 memory (up to 667mhz) in a dual-channel configuration ...
Advantages: Fast, cheap, stable, excellent support and v good manual Disadvantages: Requires a minimum of Win ME upwards
more ram at a later date, this motherboard however does NOT support sdram which is now considered obsolete for P4 boards anyway.
Onboard sound is also provided as standard with this motherboard using the AC 97 sound chip and the drivers for the sound have been updated frequently on MSi's website so there should be no problem for anyone into gaming who needs the latest sound drivers.
On the subject of driver updates i really should take this time to explain a little regarding one of the best features surrounding this motherboard (and indeed MSi's motherboards in general) included on the supplied CD is a small program called 'Live update' (requires an internet connection) now what this does is basically scan your motherboard on request to see what version drivers you have installed for both the motherboard, sound and bios and then if ...
