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Review: MSI K8N Neo Platinum Edition nF3 250Gb

by Tarinder Sandhu on 27 May 2004, 00:00

Tags: MSI

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qayi

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System setup and notes

Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.
  • MSI K8N Neo Platinum Edition NVIDA nForce3 250Gb (S754) chipset-based motherboard
  • ABIT KV8 Pro VIA K8T800 (S754) Pro chipset-based motherboard (-11 BIOS)
  • EPoX 8KDA3+ NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb (S754) chipset-based motherboard (07/04/2004 BIOS)

Other components

  • AMD Athlon 64 Model 3400+ CPU - S754 (2.2GHz)
  • ASUS Radeon 9800 XT (412/730)
  • 512MB (2x256MB) Corsair XMS3500C2, run at 2-2-2-6 for all three S754 boards
  • Pioneer 105 DVD-RW
  • Western Digital 160GB (WD1600) 8MB cache hard drive
  • Western Digital 36GB Raptor SATA hard drive
  • Dell P991 19" monitor

Software

  • Windows XP Professional SP1
  • DirectX 9.0b
  • NVIDIA nForce3 ForceWare Platform Driver (v4.24)
  • VIA Hyperion 4.51 driver set
  • ATI CATALYST 4.4 drivers and control panel
  • Pifast v4.1 to 10m places
  • Lame v3.92 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album (607MB)
  • HEXUS XviD encoding test
  • KribiBench 1.19
  • ScienceMark 2.0
  • Realstorm Raytracing benchmark 320x180x32
  • HD Tach 2.61
  • 3DMark 2001SE v330
  • UT2003 Retail (Build 2225)
  • X2: The Threat - Rolling Demo
  • Comanche 4 benchmark
  • Quake 3 v1.30 HQ
  • Call of Duty - HEXUS Custom Test
    •
Notes

No problems to report here. The board booted first time and was stable under prolonged load. We ran our gamut benchmarks with the BIOS' high performance setting enabled.

2210.9MHz - AMD Athlon 64 Model 3400+ / EPoX 8KDA3+ (nForce3 250Gb - 2-2-2-6)

2210.7MHz - AMD Athlon 64 Model 3400+ / MSI K8N Neo P.E (nForce3 250Gb - 2-2-2-6)

2205.0MHz - AMD Athlon 64 Model 3400+ / ABIT KV8 Pro (VIA K8T800 Pro - 2-2-2-6)

Overclocking

Having locked AGP/PCI buses is great. The problems encountered when overclocking MSI's nForce3 250Gb were also found on EPoX's. Knocking the multiplier down to 9x and raising the driven clock caused the board to fail POST when rebooting. In fact, the board fails to reboot if the multiplier is set to anything other than default. It's annoying that this should be the case, as overclocking potential is one of the nForce3 250Gb's biggest draws. We had to manually reset CMOS each time. Any attempts at lowering the BIOS' multiplier led to failure. Sure, you can simply increase the driven clock with the default 11x for a Model 3400+, but you quickly run into a CPU headroom ceiling. We hit that ceiling at 221MHz.

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