Is anandtech getting cherry picked MSI boards?

[Zebo]

I have a "K8N Neo Platinum" skt 754 (MS-7030) and thier are a number of issues but I bought this board on AT rec.

1. This MSI neo undervolts chip by .1

I set max 1.8 I get 1.68

2. my windond ram runs high levels in all other boards but not even stock speeds in this.

3. HTT above 260 fails to post.

4. cheap chineese capacitors vs japanaese rubycon or chemicon on ABIT/DFI/ASUS

5. Many users accross web have been noting similar problems and massive temp issues. I show 65C and my Waterblock is room temp to the touch.

As far as cherry picked. I would'nt even say that really I would say a completely different board.

Compare neweggs retail pic with anand techs
http://images10.newegg.com/pro...mage/13-130-457-09.JPG
http://images.anandtech.com/re...2004/socket754/msi.jpg

Notice the four caps behind mosfet heatsinks...the cheap green CPU caps on the newegg vs. highend dark, most likly japanese rubycon caps. These large caps are directly powering CPU which probably accounts for my voltage issues and fluctuations on retail model.


Anyway this was a bad experiance.

 

[dbdynsty25]

My Neo2 Platinum (Intel) board is rock solid. I've got no complaints.

 

[orangat]

That looks bad.

Is this practise confined to MSI or are all the big manufacturers doing this?. I came across this nonsense way back when I noticed cheapo m/b manufacturers would use decent caps in their first batch and revert to no name brands later on.

So I wouldn't be surprised if MSI (or any other big company) would make a high quality batch for Anand and Tom's to get good reviews and stick on crap for later batches.

"My Neo2 Platinum (Intel) board is rock solid. I've got no complaints."

I think the phrase rock solid is overused especially on newegg's review comments. What is rock solid? Is merely running w/o crashing considered rock solid? PC's are surprising balky equipment and we don't really know what goes on in the background when memory errors for example are corrected w/o us knowing about it.

 

[dbdynsty25]

Excuse me for "new-egging" a phrase. I consider rock solid a stable board that you can overclock a bit and still run all your programs and applications without having a problems. My Gigabyte board that I came from was NOT rock solid. Whether it be driver issues, compatibility issues, whatever...it never ran flawlessly. My MSI board does. What would you call that?

 

[BW86]

i've only heard bad things about this board

 

[ricoDadams]

I am glad I read this. I was going to pick up this board tomorrow.

 

[o1die]

I can't comment on the latest msi board, but my 865pe neo2 LS is the best overclocker I've ever used. Some of the older msi boards didn't fare well, and required replacement by msi. They have good customer service. An rma takes about 2 weeks by fedex ground.

 

[User5]

I cant say I've heard nothing but bad things about this board, but I havent heard so many people have problems with a motherboard in a long long time. Within about 3 minutes of browsing around at the MSI forums, I was completely turned off from that board. Sure its one of the top performers, but I would rather not risk it for a few extra, unnoticeable FPS

 

[dbdynsty25]

Originally posted by: o1die
I can't comment on the latest msi board, but my 865pe neo2 LS is the best overclocker I've ever used. Some of the older msi boards didn't fare well, and required replacement by msi. They have good customer service. An rma takes about 2 weeks by fedex ground.

Yeah I've got the Platinum Edition and it's been outstanding so far.

 

[imported_davehries]

I have the MSI K8N Neo2 with AMD64 3500 processor and 1Gb of OCZ 3500 Performance RAM. This combo has been running great from day one. Started right up from power on and installed XP in quick fashion. Just install everything by the book and you should not have any problems.

 

[MithShrike]

On a computer with a Neo2 Platinum at the moment and it is not the board I plan on using for my PC.

 

[imported_texan]

Originally posted by: User5
I cant say I've heard nothing but bad things about this board, but I havent heard so many people have problems with a motherboard in a long long time. Within about 3 minutes of browsing around at the MSI forums, I was completely turned off from that board. Sure its one of the top performers, but I would rather not risk it for a few extra, unnoticeable FPS

Let's remember two things before rendering final judgement:

1) This is a brand new board running a brand new chipset with many unique features, insofar as motherboard construction goes. The AMD64 chips are also going through rapid growing pains in the form of different cores, different stepping designs, and differing cache size/clock rates. To expect that things will work perfectly first time out, given all these new components needing to work perfectly together, is ridiculous. Give the manufacturers a few good months to tweak drivers & BIOS and then you can deliver final verdicts.

2) Who do you think primarily trafficks MSI user forums... people who've had no problems with their builds or people who've run into snags along the way? That the overwhelming majority of posts on a dedicated help forum are of problems is not surprising, that's the nature of the forum.

 

[oldfart]

I had an MSI BX, 815 and 865 based board. Every one of them was junk. The 865 neo board was the last straw. It was DOA. Every time I've tried them, I was sorry. Buggy bios. POOR overclocker, quality problems, etc etc. They typically put out first to market, lots of feature boards, but they just dont work well.

 

[ChineseDemocracyGNR]

About the green capacitors near the CPU socket: Newegg's pictures show they used them for the K8T Neo-F, but not the more expensive Neo2-FIR.

 

[orangat]

Originally posted by: dbdynsty25
Excuse me for "new-egging" a phrase. I consider rock solid a stable board that you can overclock a bit and still run all your programs and applications without having a problems. My Gigabyte board that I came from was NOT rock solid. Whether it be driver issues, compatibility issues, whatever...it never ran flawlessly. My MSI board does. What would you call that?

I should have said I wasn't mentioning you in particular but the general statement that my powersupply/cpu/mb/memory rocks! means very little when theres no supporting information.

My confidence in MSI is a little shaky since there was a lawsuit recently in June04 about m/b failures due to bad capacitors. All the big companies had the same problem and Abit promised to use only quality Jap caps, MSI is yet to provide any comment.

 

[dacull]

Well i'm glad someone brought this up, I was thinking along the same lines myself.

I have the MSI K8N Neo2 Plat 54G, and I can say that it is undoubtedly NOT the same board that was reviewed by anandtech and given such a glowing review. Really I think this sort of thing should be illegal as it is misrepresentation and misadvertising. Imagine if car makers gave cars to reviewers with different engines and better components. I don't think people would be so happy with that.

There are many many faults with the current Neo2 not all of the faults have workarounds via bios/chipset fixes either, there are -electrical- faults on the current msi neo2.

By the way zebo you can probably improve your temp readouts by flashing to bios 1.2 (neo2) or 1.4 (neo)

Its a shame really I would pay an extra 10-30% to get decent quality caps, and a mobo that DOES what it says on the box.

 

[Nessism]

Knock on wood, my 8KN NEO FSR is running fine so far. I haven't overclocked it yet so maybe that has something to do with it.

As far as undervolting the CPU and inaccurate temp readings go, how is one to know what is correct? The values reported are dependent on how the board/bios interperts/measures them. So if the board isn't capable of measuring them accurately, or if the bios misinterpets them, the numbers will be wrong.

My guess is that there ARE problems with under/over volting on some boards. I just don't trust the software interface to properly tell the tale.

Ed

 

[otispunkmeyer]

ho ho ho i feel so good now........it was a toss up for me between this msi k8 neo or what ever and the asus k8n-e deluxe.....boy am i glad i got the asus.....zero problems an i never even built a full pc on my own before! running a lovely stable overclock on my 3200 with some nifty geil value ram!!

 

[imported_texan]

Originally posted by: dacull
Well i'm glad someone brought this up, I was thinking along the same lines myself.

I have the MSI K8N Neo2 Plat 54G, and I can say that it is undoubtedly NOT the same board that was reviewed by anandtech and given such a glowing review. Really I think this sort of thing should be illegal as it is misrepresentation and misadvertising. Imagine if car makers gave cars to reviewers with different engines and better components. I don't think people would be so happy with that.

There are many many faults with the current Neo2 not all of the faults have workarounds via bios/chipset fixes either, there are -electrical- faults on the current msi neo2.

By the way zebo you can probably improve your temp readouts by flashing to bios 1.2 (neo2) or 1.4 (neo)

Its a shame really I would pay an extra 10-30% to get decent quality caps, and a mobo that DOES what it says on the box.

This forum is starting to scare me. Is the normal way of things for people to just throw comments out like this and not have to explain themselves at all?

My K8N Neo2 is looks EXACTLY like that of the Anandtech review and Newegg's product shots. MOSFETs are black too. Would someone like to provide a picture of the board they have running different caps than advertised, or at least point to some wrong doing on MSI's part?

I'd like to hear the "many many" faults listing of this board, because other than the temp issue (which seems to have been resolved with bios 1.2) my computer has given me absolutely no problems whatsoever.

 

[Resh]

I'm with Texan. I've built two systems with K8N Neo Platinums (S754) using value RAM (Corsaire & TwinMOS) and neither has had so much as a hiccup. I'm using the on-board LAN, audio, and firewall and have had no problems.

Maybe there are some bad boards out there. I had a really problematic KT3 Ultra a while back, but also had an equally wiggy Asus CUSL2. I've had a great AOpen board and a crappy one. I think models are what we have to talk about, not this brand is better than that.

N

 

[ctk1981]

First off, which bios are you using?

The latest beta 1.52 has worked great wonders for me in the HTT dept. I can now run HTT 4X at 250 which works great for my overclock. Havent tried running a higher FSB lately, but under one bios I was able to make it to 280 before it started bombing out.

Also, under the 1.52 beta bios you can see some of the hidden features. When you get to the bios screen, press shift + F2 then alt + F3. Then under power managment you will see a setting Hammer VID or something like that. Set it to 1.55 (I think thats the greatest option there). This will affect your vcore voltage. I had mine running on the highest setting and at 1.7V vcore, it was putting out roughly 1.712. Keeps it more in line, before I had some fluctuations.

The temp issue has been fixed, broken, fixed, broken etc etc. It seems to change from bios to bios. I honestly stopped caring a long time ago. Once the computer was up and running under full load I grabbed my heatsink to see how it felt. It was room temp. Thats good enough info for me.

Also when you flash a new bios, make sure you use the following settings: awfl833d w7030NMS.152 /ld/py/sn/wb/cc/cd/cp/r/f.

One last thing, if you are using an SATA drive you should have it plugged into 3 + 4 ports, not 1 + 2. Good luck!

On the memory, you might try different slots. 1+3 work good for me. There was quite a list of ram that does/doesnt work on the msi forums, might want to check that out to see if anyone else is having similiar problems such as yourself. As far as it works in other motherboards.....in other A64 motherboards, or just other motherboards? The mem controller is on the A64 processor now of course, so different processors can handle different types of memorys, sizes etc. The CG steppings are the better ones.

 

[imported_RobJ]

Originally posted by: texan
This forum is starting to scare me. Is the normal way of things for people to just throw comments out like this and not have to explain themselves at all?

My K8N Neo2 is looks EXACTLY like that of the Anandtech review and Newegg's product shots. MOSFETs are black too. Would someone like to provide a picture of the board they have running different caps than advertised, or at least point to some wrong doing on MSI's part?

I'd like to hear the "many many" faults listing of this board, because other than the temp issue (which seems to have been resolved with bios 1.2) my computer has given me absolutely no problems whatsoever.

As an owner of the K8N Neo2 Platinum, I'll list some faults:

1) Most importantly, my mobo died after two days of use apparently. I can't be certain of this, but if anyone has been reading my post Catastrophe, you can see that we've pretty much ruled everything else out. When i get a new board back, i'll know for sure ...

2) The extra USB headers at the bottom don't seem to work because i plugged the module in that has extra USB ports and diagnostic LEDs, and none of the ports worked. Also, the ports from my case didn't work when plugged into the mobo

3) The temp readings were sometimes correct, sometimes reading -12C and such. Maybe fixed with new bios, but still ...

I still have faith in MSI and this board, but it is a big pain that my computer is out of operation and has been since the second day after i built it about 2 weeks ago!

 

[Zebo]

Like I would'nt be using the most current bios :roll.

Listen this is the skt 754 model not the 939 and it has green *CAPS* not mosfets. reading comp.

The anand board has black ones and obviously better since they got such good results. Immaterial now since I've RMA'd that board faster than Marion Jones sprinted from her drug testing dates.

 

[LocutusX]

what did you replace it with? Epox?

 

[Zebo]

ABIT only cause I can't find DFI.

Via :::shutter:::