Conclusion:

Overall, I must say I'm very impressed with this motherboard. MSI has certainly improved their standing in my mind with the performance orientation and attention to detail involved when designing this board.

While no board is complaint free, as this board is not, the Neo2 does come very close. Aside from the AGP retention clip snafu, and the SATA 1+2 ports not maintaining PCI lock, I cannot find fault with this particular unit. I did also come across an odd incompatibility with a 1GB/2x512mb kit of OCZ PC3500EB. While this memory was able to be run at and up to about 220MHz memory speed and HTT, testing past that point failed as memory became unstable. However, the same ram is stable up to 245 MHz in my Asus A8V rev 2.0. I feel this is a bios issue that should be fixed in newer bios revisions, hopefully.

In limited testing I was able to get the HTT bus to 300 MHz while running a 5:3 ram divider. Unfortunately, due to time constraints I was unable to complete benchmark testing at 300 MHz HTT and 5:3 ram dividers. I cannot confirm total stability at 300 MHz HTT, but my gut feeling is that it would be. I look forward to using this board in future ram and video card reviews. At no time during testing did I experience any instabilities not directly related to overclocking or prior mentioned issues.

I have no hesitations recommending this board provided you are not averse to speed, stability, and bragging rights! Combine this with a dead sexy PCB and you have all the makings high performance PC, just add A64 and a dollop of high performance memory for knock your socks off power.



Questions/Comments: forum thread

Update: There seems to be a problem on Windows XP with the NF3 250gb and nVidia and ATI's latest videocards when using the popular "Punkbuster" anti-cheat application



More info on this here. Also check out this comment placed in our forums by scheherazade