MSI K8N Neo now available

[RLiu818]

so did anyone find out if the sata drivers are already oh the mobo and u wont need to install the drivers through a floppy while installing win xp?

i want to know cuz i dont want to purchase a new floppy.

 

[FiberoN]

Well, none of us have received it yet but some are scheduled to arrive by tommorow. And, is it really that much of a problem to buy a 11 dollar floppy drive?

 

[JulesMaximus]

Originally posted by: FiberoN
anyone planning on overclocking with this motherboard? I plan on taking my 3000+ @ 2.0ghz to at least 2.2ghz on a Thermaltake Venus12 cooler

Hadn't planned on it. I'm putting a 3400+ on it though so it will be running at 2.2GHz. It should be fast enough, I'm just looking for a board that will run SATA RAID on 2 WD Raptors stably. My Asus K8V won't do that.

 

[Bar81]

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus

Originally posted by: FiberoN
anyone planning on overclocking with this motherboard? I plan on taking my 3000+ @ 2.0ghz to at least 2.2ghz on a Thermaltake Venus12 cooler

Hadn't planned on it. I'm putting a 3400+ on it though so it will be running at 2.2GHz. It should be fast enough, I'm just looking for a board that will run SATA RAID on 2 WD Raptors stably. My Asus K8V won't do that.

Why would you waste money you don't have to on a $150 motherboard for that?!? If all you want to do is run two Raptors in RAID without overclocking, an ASRock K8S8X will give you the fastest performance of *any* K8 board for around $85. You're just throwing money away.

 

[SeaFoam]

Originally posted by: FiberoN
anyone planning on overclocking with this motherboard? I plan on taking my 3000+ @ 2.0ghz to at least 2.2ghz on a Thermaltake Venus12 cooler

I'm gonna clock the sh*t out of it.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Originally posted by: Bar81

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus

Originally posted by: FiberoN
anyone planning on overclocking with this motherboard? I plan on taking my 3000+ @ 2.0ghz to at least 2.2ghz on a Thermaltake Venus12 cooler

Hadn't planned on it. I'm putting a 3400+ on it though so it will be running at 2.2GHz. It should be fast enough, I'm just looking for a board that will run SATA RAID on 2 WD Raptors stably. My Asus K8V won't do that.

Why would you waste money you don't have to on a $150 motherboard for that?!? If all you want to do is run two Raptors in RAID without overclocking, an ASRock K8S8X will give you the fastest performance of *any* K8 board for around $85. You're just throwing money away.

What do you mean waste money I don't have? I like the features on this board like the on chip firewall and the Giga-Lan that doesn't run through the PCI bus. I might explore some O/C features but really I just want my RAID to work.

I'm going to RMA the ASUS board for a replacement and sell it off on e-bay.

 

[MikhailT]

I noticed in the Bios, that there are no shutdown temp. So how does the board protect from overheating? (Not that I'll be overclocking)It would be nice to know the board will shut down in an unfortune event that the cpu goes up to lets say 70C.

 

[DemiSheep]

Well my motherboard arrived at my apartment...but i am at work so UPS wasnt able to deliever it yet argh!!! Im going to have to have them change the address to my work address and hopefully they'll get it here (at work) tomorrow..................*Sigh* Unless I can pick it up from UPS my self.... Anyone know about that?

 

[JulesMaximus]

Mine is out for delivery. They'll leave it at my front door. They always do since they have a signed release on file. Never had a problem but then my house is on a Cul de sac street in a nice neighborhood. I always leave a $200 jogging stroller right outside my front door (can't see it from the street) so I'm not worried about the occassional brown box being left there.

 

[DemiSheep]

Im home now... Called UPS and Im going to go pickup my package from their office tonight... =D

 

[FiberoN]

BTW, there's a Maximum PC review on the mobo. They gave it a 9 Kick Ass. oh and the native sata does mean you don't need to have a floppy and the drivers ready. (says in the review).

 

[DemiSheep]

I went and picked up my motherboard from UPS offices... Its sitting in my lap....

 

[FiberoN]

My pc order gets here wednesday

 

[JulesMaximus]

Originally posted by: FiberoN
BTW, there's a Maximum PC review on the mobo. They gave it a 9 Kick Ass. oh and the native sata does mean you don't need to have a floppy and the drivers ready. (says in the review).

I noticed that as well. Oh well, you learn something new everyday.

 

[ArmenK]

Whoever got this board, please post your impressions.

 

[LostHiWay]

I just got the new MSI K8N Neo Plat. nForce3 board and an A64 3000+ (everything at default for now)

For the life of me I can't figure out why the temps are so high...Right now it's running at 66 degrees C. I've been swapping out Athlon XP's and other CPU's for the past 3 years and have never had a problem like this.

I'm using Artic Silver 5 as the thermal compound...Just a rice size amount in the middle of the CPU...then put the HSF fan on...just like it shows on the artic silver website. Still it's running way to hot. I've even tried the cheap radio shack compound...same thing.

Any ideas?

 

[FiberoN]

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus

Originally posted by: FiberoN
BTW, there's a Maximum PC review on the mobo. They gave it a 9 Kick Ass. oh and the native sata does mean you don't need to have a floppy and the drivers ready. (says in the review).

I noticed that as well. Oh well, you learn something new everyday.

One thing I forgot. It also says if you are going to run a RAID, you DO need to do the floppy/F6 trick thing. Only if you are just installing a regular SATA drive with no RAID, you don't need the floppy and drivers. (According to a MaximumPC review)

 

[Jaxidian]

Originally posted by: LostHiWay
I just got the new MSI K8N Neo Plat. nForce3 board and an A64 3000+ (everything at default for now)

For the life of me I can't figure out why the temps are so high...Right now it's running at 66 degrees C. I've been swapping out Athlon XP's and other CPU's for the past 3 years and have never had a problem like this.

I'm using Artic Silver 5 as the thermal compound...Just a rice size amount in the middle of the CPU...then put the HSF fan on...just like it shows on the artic silver website. Still it's running way to hot. I've even tried the cheap radio shack compound...same thing.

Any ideas?

Take a razor blade and spread your AS5 over the heat spreader on the chip. A rice-sized amount may not be enough on A64s since the surface area is much larger than that of an AXP. Also, check to make sure your HS is good and snug against the cpu.

 

[SeaFoam]

You don't have it set right - something on there isn't correct, i'm consistant at 107 f.
here's the thread about setting it up and whatnot.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=29&threadid=1326207&enterthread=y

 

[Sk0t]

@LostHiWay

Touch the heatsink and see if it seems hot at all.

Theres widespread reports of the K8N neo Platiunum misreading the cpu-sensors !

Although at the moment, this problem seems to be mainly on the "newcastle core" cpus, there are reports of the same fault on other, most likely it will be fixed in a future bios.update

AMD.forum post, showing the sensor registers was changed on some revisions:
AMD post

Discussion of the temperature misreadings:
Discussion of temp.misreadings on msi k8n neo platiunum @ overclockers.co.uk

So what im trying to say here is; dont panic - check you temperature externaly (with you finger, or a temperature-probe) - ofcause you could have done something wrong, it seems more likely the reading is wrong

 

[DemiSheep]

I got my system going last night... I ran into one problem so far.. I set the "Halt On" errors to "ALL" (Its default is "All, but keyboard" And I get an error that the Keyboard is locked....

Im assuming this is a bug in the bios. Someone else that got this board can you test this theory for me? Set the "Halt On" to "ALL" and see if you get the same keyboard locked error?

 

[JulesMaximus]

Originally posted by: LostHiWay
I just got the new MSI K8N Neo Plat. nForce3 board and an A64 3000+ (everything at default for now)

For the life of me I can't figure out why the temps are so high...Right now it's running at 66 degrees C. I've been swapping out Athlon XP's and other CPU's for the past 3 years and have never had a problem like this.

I'm using Artic Silver 5 as the thermal compound...Just a rice size amount in the middle of the CPU...then put the HSF fan on...just like it shows on the artic silver website. Still it's running way to hot. I've even tried the cheap radio shack compound...same thing.

Any ideas?

I'm using a compound by Extreme Gamer (I have no idea what this stuff is but it was recommended by my local computer store for the A64 so I bought it). I put a small blob in the center of the die (well, the plate on top of the die) and spread it around to an even thin layer covering the entire top of the chip. My temps are about 42C in the bios with a couple low flow fans in the system in case temps are around 38C.

I've ran into a snag installing WinXP on RAID last night. After formatting the disks WinXP setup asked for the Nvidia RAID SCSI driver disk. I tried the disk that came with the motherboard (yes, it does come with the RAID drivers on a floppy disk) but it kept asking for the disk after I inserted it. I had already gone through the F6 and installed the RAID drivers and had WinXP format the disks so I don't know why it would ask for SCSI drivers after that. Stupid Windoze. I'm going to try setting up my 2 Raptors as regular SATA drives and install WinXP on one and use the other for swap file and storage. I ran out of time last night though so I'll mess around with it again tonight after work.

 

[LostHiWay]

Well after removing the heatsink and redoing the artic silver temps are still the same...I'm thinking the board just isn't reading the temp right. I overclocked it to 2.2ghz last night and it ran prime95 all night with no errors. The temp maxed out at 75 degrees C.

 

[SeaFoam]

Originally posted by: DemiSheep
I got my system going last night... I ran into one problem so far.. I set the "Halt On" errors to "ALL" (Its default is "All, but keyboard" And I get an error that the Keyboard is locked....

Im assuming this is a bug in the bios. Someone else that got this board can you test this theory for me? Set the "Halt On" to "ALL" and see if you get the same keyboard locked error?

Can't help you on that, using USB keyboard/mouse and not having any problems.
Try disabling USB keyboard and mouse support - see what that does.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Originally posted by: FiberoN

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus

Originally posted by: FiberoN
BTW, there's a Maximum PC review on the mobo. They gave it a 9 Kick Ass. oh and the native sata does mean you don't need to have a floppy and the drivers ready. (says in the review).

I noticed that as well. Oh well, you learn something new everyday.

One thing I forgot. It also says if you are going to run a RAID, you DO need to do the floppy/F6 trick thing. Only if you are just installing a regular SATA drive with no RAID, you don't need the floppy and drivers. (According to a MaximumPC review)

Yes, that's correct. I guess I wasn't considering using SATA as a regular single disk. My mistake.

To load Windows on a RAID you must do the floppy/F6 thing.