FuzzButt Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 Hello,Just built a PC for a customer and thought I would post my new thoughts on MSI mobo'sThis board the MSI 865PE Neo2 w/ Lan. I have it sporting a P4 2.8C and 1GB of Samsung DDR400. Other equipment includes a Seagate 120GB SATA, ATI Radeon 9600 and a Lucent based Modem.I even bought an Antec Soneta case for the parts. Anyway the installation was a snap. The case was just the right size for the ATX board. The setup was simple. Just a few changes in BIOS to put the SATA as the boot device. WinXP Home loaded fine. It did need the Intel drivers but since the SATA is native it does not need special drivers during the XP install. So far it is running great. By far the easiest PC of late that I have had the pleasure of building. This board is the $125 version that does not have raid nor has the gigabyte ethernet. It does have the Intel Pro100 Ethernet and good sound onboard. It was nice to only have to slide in the modem and AGP card instead of loading up the slots.Boot time is quick. The PC is quiet. The most noise is from the Northbridge fan or the CPU fan. The case fan is a 120mm type that makes no noise.Now all I need is to find a Microsoft Bluetooth cordless keyboard/mouse combo to round out the $2300 PC. Anyone have experiance with them?As soon as Sandra is done with the burn in I'll post the scores.Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeber Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 Wow...sweet! I've noticed lately that on-board sound is really improving, to the point, like you note, that a seperate soundcard is no longer an absolute necessity. Thank you, MOBO makers! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
b2cm Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 Microstar makes good boards. It ranks with ASUS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Prelude76 Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 yeah, i used to be ASUS ASUS ASUS for any recommendations, but last dozen or so PCs i built i used MSI. even video cards, i always go with MSI's nVidia line. love the red-look of their boards, i guess. not a single problem with any of them, knock on wood.about ASUS, i used to rely 100% on Asus, but my Athlon system with Asus K7V board was a bit of a pain, needed bios beta updates just to get it going properly. then again, it was also one of the first (maybe THE first) athlon board, so i guess bugs should've been expected. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
b2cm Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 MSI don't claim to have the fastest boards, only the stablest and durable boards. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rons Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 Agree - MSI are good boards. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted September 10, 2003 Share Posted September 10, 2003 I still prefer ASUS, but I wouldn't turn away an MSI board. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FuzzButt Posted September 10, 2003 Author Share Posted September 10, 2003 Well after running the Sandra "Burn-in" 160 times. I ran a few of the synthetic benchmarks.With the board set to "Private DOC Mode" (Doc is Dynamic Overclocking)CPU scored 8701mips, 5473MflopsMultimedia Benchmark was 13112 it/s and 20466 it/s fpuMemory scored 4803MB/s and 4826MB/sHard Drive's fastest score was 34713 kB/sOn a whim I changed to "Captian" level DOC mode and upped the FSB to 210MHzRunning at 2.94GHz 840MHz on the FSB and 66/33 AGP/PCI (all settings are seperate)CPU score went up to 8998 mips and 5500 mflopsMM score 13578 and 21387Memory up to 4994 adn 5016.Best thineg it was stable at all times even with the overclock. If it were my PC and I would run it faster than that maybe try the FSB at 225. Since it is not and the people who are buying it are not all that experianced with the fine are of monitoring an OC'd PC I am leaving it stock.The Radeon 9600 was great while playing Medal of Honor @ 1024x768 with all the settings at the greatest detail possible. Very nice for a $160 video card I can't see spending nearly 3 times that on the 9800pro.Soon as I can come up with $650 I might be buying this mobo/CPU/Memory combo for my self. Though I might spring for the version that has firewire and the gigabit ethernet.Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FuzzButt Posted September 25, 2003 Author Share Posted September 25, 2003 OK here is a follow-up,I just picked up a model board higher than the NEO-2 I had in the other PC. This one is the 865PE FIS2R. It has Firewire and SATA/PATA Raid onboard for future use. Well also purchased was an Intel P4C 2.8 and 2 512MB Sticks of Samgsung DDR400.Well I had one **** of a time getting Win XP installed. Aparantly on this board there is a bug in releation to the Samsung RAM when 1GB is used. I had to download a BIOS update for it. Good thing I had a PC to download it with. There are still lockups when ever I try to install MSI's update software so I left that off. Besides that the PC is running great so far. I think a bit of a voltage and CAS tweak might be in order to smooth things out a but especially when I try for 3GHz.Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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