http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzE0
K8N NEO4 SLI > Must Have Hardware award @ HardOCP.
K8N NEO4 SLI > Must Have Hardware award @ HardOCP.
Conclusion
Morry's Thoughts:
There’s really nothing I can say about how enamored I am with this board. The attention to detail in the board design and BIOS layout is phenomenal, saying much for the effort that MSI put in to implementing this gem. The performance and overclocking numbers really speak for themselves.
As far as shortcomings with this board, they are few and far between. Layout wise, my only concern is the placement and height of the chipset cooler. You may run in to seating issues when placing a PCI-Express video card into the secondary x16 slot. As far as the BIOS goes, the only thing that’s really missing is the menu selection to lock down the PCI bus. However, this did not seem to cause any issues while overclocking, since the board easily hit a 375MHz FSB without any type of drive corruption whatsoever so obviously it is locking down the PCI automatically.
MSI has really got a winner on their hands with this board. If you’re looking to upgrade and want to take the Athlon64 socket 939 plunge, don’t even think about getting another board. This is the board to get. Period.
Kyle's Thoughts:
After experiencing the ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard, I really thought that it would be hard to hold a candle to by any other manufacturer, much less surpass. The MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI does exactly that. From our experiences, while the ASUS A8N-SLI is an excellent piece of engineering, the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI seems to be even better.
The differences in low resolution benchmarks are fairly sizeable, although, it is does not look at these will translate into such faster frame rates at high resolutions and eye candy settings so beware. In fact, I am still not sure what the exact differences are, except to say that the MSI motherboard is enjoying a more matured set of drivers. To pass the performance difference off on drivers alone would be irresponsible though. I think that MSI has taken more time and put together a superiorly engineered SLI motherboard in the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI.
We did have some issues with our engineering sample of the board that was initially tested. We waited to get a full retail sample tested before publishing this review as we would with any motherboard. The retail MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI motherboard was near flawless in our stress testing.
I only had two pet peeves that were not pointed out above by Morry. The way that MSI has implemented the holder for the SLI card adapter is just plain cheesy and hard to work with. That said, once you get it set, you really should not have to touch if for a good while, so this point is likely moot. Also, keep in mind that we did need some airflow across the board's power components when overclocking and stress testing. This is not unusual for any motherboard, but was not needed on our engineering sample. (Differences such as this are the reason for testing retail sample products before publishing.)
Overall, the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI is the best SLI motherboard on the market that we have had the pleasure of working with, not to mention that it is an overclocking giant. 2005 is looking to be a great year for MSI in the motherboard arena and we are happy to welcome them back to building true enthusiast products.