MSI Bundle and Presentation
Whilst everything else in the PC industry is becoming smaller and smaller the boxes are going in the opposite direction. The MSI 875P Neo weighed in at 2.5KG. You obviously receive a lot more than the board itself, so what exactly constitutes the goodies ?.
Motherboard manufacturers seem to be keen on personalising their boards. Here, a red rounded ATA133 cable gives the package some kind of individuality. The accompanying floppy drive cable is generic in nature.. A total of four orange S-ATA cables and 2 S-ATA-to-molex adapters are included to get you up and running. MSI usually produce excellent manuals. That seems to be the case here, although you do get the feeling that the manual is aimed at a number of different MSI motherboards. Two floppy discs help you with your hard drive setups.
Software-wise, MSI bundle what they now term as Core Center. Put simply, it's a nice graphical representation of your system's core attributes, such as speed, FSB, voltage, and temperatures. You can also manipulate your FSB from within an OS environment. Their in-house LiveBIOS and LiveMonitor helps you update the board's BIOS without fuss. A driver CD and utility pack (comprising of WinDVD, WinRip, RestoreIT, Virtual Drive, Media Dialer, and Adobe Photoshop album) complete the software side of things.
MSI are fans of add-on brackets. That's verified by the four provided with the 875P Neo. Going from top to bottom, a standard S/PDIF bracket that feeds off the AD1980 CODEC and provides both optical and RCA digital-out, a 3-port Firewire (1394a) bracket, a 2-port USB2.0 and diagnostic bracket, and a further sound-based bracket with duplicate S/PDIF RCA and optical outs, as well as dedicated centre/sub and rear speaker analogue outputs. A rather obvious problem of using these brackets concurrently is the natural blocking of PCI slots. We'd rather be facing that problem than not having the brackets.
