MSI Bearlake MBO's review - P35 Neo
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 11 May 2007

P35 Neo is a bit striped-down version of the Platinum, with five Serial ATA ports, much simpler passive cooling solution (a couple of heatsinks and off you go), a simpler back panel (four USB's, 2xPS/2, Parallel port, COM port, FireWire, LAN and 7.1 audio jacks). There's also a P35 Neo Combo version, that also supports DDR3 (2xDDR2 and 2xDDR3), but regular one has four DDR2 slots.

Both of these motherboards have a fairly regular bundle - Serial ATA cables, Parallel ATA cable, floppy cable, drivers for XP and Vista, so pretty much everything you need. If you're really into details, you might notice that there's also a difference in colour (Platinum is grey/green, while P35 Neo is red), which is something we already saw in MSI's products before.

We used our standard equipment for testing:

- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
- OCZ SLI-Ready memory
- OCZ Vindicator cooler
- OCZ GameXstream 850W
- ASUS EN7900GTX VGA card
- WD RaptorX 150GB