Highlights of the MSI Board – Affordable, Heatpipe on Board
We’ll refrain from pointing out every detail of the two boards we have selected, since this isn’t a motherboard review. Instead, we’ll just showcase the highlight of each to help you decide which one is the right board for you.
Both companies use all-solid capacitors in their products, ensuring a longer life than when using conventional electrolyte capacitors.
MSI P35 Neo2 (MS-7345)
The highlight of MSI’s design is definitely the heatpipe, which draws heat away from the northbridge, the southbridge and several of the voltage regulation modules.
A VIA chip provides the Firewire functionality on the FIR model. There are 8 LEDs on the lower part of the board which indicate the current status using a code. In case of a boot failure, a freeze or other problems, you can simply look up the code in the manual to diagnose the problem.
A red button that can be used to reset the BIOS if the board won’t start is located right next to the CMOS battery. This is an incredibly overclocker-friendly feature – not only do you no longer have to fiddle around with jumpers, your last settings are also retained, making overclocking experiments much easier.
MSI uses Realtek’s ALC888 as its on-board sound chip.
Although the board only features physical PCIe lanes for one 16x and one 4x connector, you can still create a crossfire configuration using two ATi cards. The processors auxiliary power connector uses 8 pins, but you can use a 4-pin connector as well.
MSI includes a few helpful wire-organizer brackets for the USB, Firewire and Power/Reset pins with its board, making wiring from the tower to the motherboard a piece of cake.
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so what you just said, is the newer stuff is better
i dont know why they take 10 pages to show what can be said in 1 page + a few graphs
On top of that Crysis is meant to be very cpu dependant and prefers 4 cores - it's the way things are going
Hmm, if they'd have gone for a different motherboard they could have gotten the q6600 to 3.6 on air.
Dunno if you have a duff chip or mobo. I have a Q6600 and exactly the same cooler and I can do 3.41 GHz at stock voltage on a Gigabyte 965P-DS3P.
"Its stock clock speed is 2.4 GHz, which it operates at using a comparatively low core voltage of 1.3125 Volts – the lowest core voltage available for this chip"
Wrong my Q6600 is 1.26V although it runs slightly higher in practice.
http://i152.photobucket.com/albums [...] s/Quad.jpg
I guess this shows how OC'ing can vary depending on luck. Even hand picking the best S numbers is no guarantee. A bit of luck (unless you have deep pockets) can be key.
Fortunately for myself, my Q6600 is 1.28v core, and hits 3.6GHz with only slight bump.
Indeed electron migration is a significant issue at high Vcore but realistically most of us overclocking are probably running 6-12 month cycles on our hardware (at least from my experience) and the cost of killing a mid range part every year against taking a top end part is still more cost effective.
That's given only one CPU in the past 15 that I've OC'd have failed (possibly luck?) on me and that was due to a faulty voltage regulator on my motherboard
Very nice review/test. Highly informative. I was gonna buy a 6850 or a quad core but now im just gonna grab the low cost msi board and a 6750 and spent my cash elsewhere.
question, you end up recommending the MSI motherboard, but the test system states that you used the gigabyte for the test. Will i be able to get the same clocking abilities with the MSI?