Questions on MSI Athlon 64 Socket 754 MOBOs

I am seriously considering buying an Athlon 64 combo, and am looking
at socket 754. I have found three MOBOs:

1) MSI K8N Neo Platinum
2) MSI K8T Neo-FSR
3) MSI K8MM-ILSR

The third board is Mini-ATX, while the other two are straight ATX.
Hence the third board only has three PCI slots vice five on the
others.

I like the third board because it has on-board video. But MSI shows
this caveat on its web page:

'Due to the High Performance Memory design, motherboards or system
configurations may or may not operate smoothly at the JEDEC (Joint
Electron Device Engineering Council) standard settings (BIOS Default
on the motherboard) such as DDR voltage, memory speeds and memory
timing. Please confirm and adjust your memory setting in the BIOS
accordingly for better system stability.'

This scares me some. Does anyone have opinions or experiences using
any of these MOBOs? Or other MOBOs in this category? I plan to also
buy a 3400+ CPU and 512M DDR400.

Thank you

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 06:09:45 -0500, wrote:

I am seriously considering buying an Athlon 64 combo, and am looking
at socket 754. I have found three MOBOs:

1) MSI K8N Neo Platinum
2) MSI K8T Neo-FSR
3) MSI K8MM-ILSR

The third board is Mini-ATX, while the other two are straight ATX.
Hence the third board only has three PCI slots vice five on the
others.

I like the third board because it has on-board video. But MSI shows
this caveat on its web page:

'Due to the High Performance Memory design, motherboards or system
configurations may or may not operate smoothly at the JEDEC (Joint
Electron Device Engineering Council) standard settings (BIOS Default
on the motherboard) such as DDR voltage, memory speeds and memory
timing. Please confirm and adjust your memory setting in the BIOS
accordingly for better system stability.'

This scares me some. Does anyone have opinions or experiences using
any of these MOBOs? Or other MOBOs in this category? I plan to also
buy a 3400+ CPU and 512M DDR400.


I don't have experience with the third board, but *any*
board with integral DDR-based video is subject to this,
they're more picky about memory. Often if you want to use
budget priced memory with multiple modules you might find
that changing bios settings is prudent. Increasing voltage
to 2.6 at least is common if not the motherboard's default,
and often other timings changes.

To incease the odds of avoiding such a situation you might
buy modules recommended by motherboard manufacturer or from
memory seller with guaranteed compatibility like
http://www.crucial.com It's also beneficial to buy a board
that allows these adjustments even if you expect/hope to not
need them but I don't know if aforementioned boards do or
not. http://forums.amdmb.com is a good place to research
particular boards and user experience with them.

Test system with memtest86 after any changes, prior to
booting the operating system.

Also keep in mind that the third board's video is
Savage-based technology. While it's perfectly suited for
typical 2D use or DVD, it's not sufficient for even
remotely-modern gaming. Point being, a video card with
similar performance might be relatively inexpensive. For
example a Geforce 2 MX would be as fast and could be found
on ebay or elsewhere for under $25, which might completely
offset any saving from the integral video due to not needing
as high a quality (or reduced timings, slower performance
from) memory... even though I don't advise use of generic
memory, rather budget grade name-brand memory at least.

wrote:
I am seriously considering buying an Athlon 64 combo, and am looking
at socket 754. I have found three MOBOs:

1) MSI K8N Neo Platinum
2) MSI K8T Neo-FSR
3) MSI K8MM-ILSR

I am running the MSI K8mm-ILSR with AMD64 3000+ and 512M DDR400 with no
problems. The manual is very poor, and you have to go to the MSI site
for the S3 on-board video drivers and the Ethernet driver.

As kony mentioned the video is not fast enough for serious gaming, but
it passes the dxdiag tests OK. It defaults to 48M shared memory, and I
haven't played with the setting. The 6 channel sounds OK on my stereo
only set-up.

I originally set up the board with Win98SE, and am now running WinXP
Professional. Both worked fine, though they require different drivers
from the MSI site. I plan to test the Win64 beta which just arrived
from Microsoft Evaluation.

The third board is Mini-ATX, while the other two are straight ATX.
Hence the third board only has three PCI slots vice five on the
others.

It does have an 8X/4X AGP slot, if you want to upgrade the video, and
with on-board Ethernet, you don't need a LAN card.

I like the third board because it has on-board video. But MSI shows
this caveat on its web page:

'Due to the High Performance Memory design, motherboards or system
configurations may or may not operate smoothly at the JEDEC (Joint
Electron Device Engineering Council) standard settings (BIOS Default
on the motherboard) such as DDR voltage, memory speeds and memory
timing. Please confirm and adjust your memory setting in the BIOS
accordingly for better system stability.'

This scares me some. Does anyone have opinions or experiences using
any of these MOBOs? Or other MOBOs in this category? I plan to also
buy a 3400+ CPU and 512M DDR400.

I am using memory from pcclub, single stick 512M, with no problems.

For about $220 plus the memory cost I got the board and a boxed AMD64
3000+ CPU. (The 3000+ seemed to be the "sweet spot" for cost.)

Virg Wall

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 18:25:05 GMT, kony wrote:


I don't have experience with the third board, but *any*
board with integral DDR-based video is subject to this,
they're more picky about memory. Often if you want to use
budget priced memory with multiple modules you might find
that changing bios settings is prudent. Increasing voltage
to 2.6 at least is common if not the motherboard's default,
and often other timings changes.

To incease the odds of avoiding such a situation you might
buy modules recommended by motherboard manufacturer or from
memory seller with guaranteed compatibility like
http://www.crucial.com It's also beneficial to buy a board
that allows these adjustments even if you expect/hope to not
need them but I don't know if aforementioned boards do or
not. http://forums.amdmb.com is a good place to research
particular boards and user experience with them.

Test system with memtest86 after any changes, prior to
booting the operating system.

Also keep in mind that the third board's video is
Savage-based technology. While it's perfectly suited for
typical 2D use or DVD, it's not sufficient for even
remotely-modern gaming. Point being, a video card with
similar performance might be relatively inexpensive. For
example a Geforce 2 MX would be as fast and could be found
on ebay or elsewhere for under $25, which might completely
offset any saving from the integral video due to not needing
as high a quality (or reduced timings, slower performance
from) memory... even though I don't advise use of generic
memory, rather budget grade name-brand memory at least.


I went to site http://forums.amdmb.com reviews which gave me:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=57&type=expert

And I find that the Corsair ad on the right of the window covers half
of the motherboard review that I want to read. Can you tell me how to
remove just the ad so I can read the review? What a pain!!!!

Thanks