First a little background on this upgrade:
- Prior to this combo I had myself a DFI Lanparty nforce4 ultra (from the first batch released), the board while a tweakers/overclocker heaven had way too much settings to optimize and some small but annoying glitches.
After 2 months beeing sick of it I decided to look for alternatives (not extreme but more stable and whatnot), in the process I've changed most of my remaining computer hardware in order to troubleshoot any possible problem.
The motherboard choosen (not that there are lots of options) was the MSI K8N NEO4.
Let me just say that while i'm impressed with the board packaging and whatnot i'm getting seriously frustated with the board itself...
Before I list my "complains" here is the hardware used:
Athlon 64 3000+ (VENICE)
MSI K8N NEO4 Platinum
2x512MB PC3200 Samsung TCCD
Albatron Geforce6600GT
2x160GB Hitachi SATA II hdd's
Pionner A108
Enermax Noisetaker 420w
Now for the problems...
- I can't get the cpu stable (prime, windows,etc..) with the same settings I had as "minimum" on the dfi - 2.3Ghz with 1.4v (tried equal and higher voltages on vdimm and chipset) with 255Mhz/229Mhz (ram cpu)...the cpu simply fails
- The board unlike Abit,Epox,DFI doesn't seem to have the "INSERT FUNCTION" when you are in POST (in case things go wrong), resulting in endless...and I mean endless CMOS resets... (at least they added a RESET CMOS button..i wonder why)
- The board doesn't work in a reliable way with custom ram timmings (tested and proved in other boards), specialy 1T timming...
- The board doesn't seem to record the voltage set in bios in windows (and the post itself seems to be made at default vcore, only then beeing changed)
- Its easy to get the "RAID BIOS ROM" problem that most people with DFI know about, diference is it happened with +280Mhz FSB and not sub 260Mhz like on the MSI
- Unlike the DFI nforce4 ultra there doesn't seem to be a bios option or application to controle and regulate the chipset fans, which in these days is not understandable..ad to that a bad bloated temp reading software....
I'm way above dissapointed with all this considering the time i've already lost with the DFI, now with this and the fact that I simply want a stable computer without extreme overclocks (and belive me 2.4Ghz for this Venice is eeeasssy)
Not to mention the upgrade cost from the DFI to the MSI (that is expensive to say the least)
/end rant :/