AM2 MBO Round-up: Part VII
Author: Josip Brombauer
Date: 18 Dec 2006

It?s time to introduce a new motherboard manufacturer into the AM2 equation: Micro-Star International, also known as MSI. If you?ll recall, a board made by MSI won our Core 2 MBO round-up a couple of weeks ago, so naturally we have high expectations when it comes to the two boards reviewed today. The K9N Ultra and the K9N Neo are quite similar to one another, the differences being limited to the choice of chipset and a few extra ports here and there. But is the performance also comparable? Join us as we put them to the test?
MSI K9N Ultra

As you may have guessed from the name, this particular MBO is based on the Nvidia nForce 570 Ultra chipset. MSI is yet another manufacturer that prefers a colourful product, though unlike Gigabyte which uses blue as the colour for the PCB, MSI chooses red. While we are at the subject of colours, we need to point out a potential problem with the colour coding. MSI chose to differentiate the DIMM slots according to channel, so channel A is coloured green, while channel B is orange. As a result, you need to insert one RAM module into a green slot and the second into an orange slot, which can be a bit confusing for some.
The board requires a molex connector in addition to the 24-pin and the 4-pin 12V power connectors to ensure stable supply of current. While configuring the testbed we?ve noticed that a two-slot graphics card will cover a few SATA ports, rendering them unusable, so that?s a definite minus for the layout. Then again, there?s a button to clear the CMOS (sadly no on/off or reset buttons) which is a plus. A rather plain aluminium heatsink is used for chipset cooling, and we noticed it tends to get quite hot while under full load.
So, what do you get with this board? On the inside, one PCI Express x16, three PCI Express x1 and three PCI slots (one of them is coloured orange since it has some added functionality for MSI?s add-on cards), six SATA channels, an IDE and a floppy controller. On the outside, four USB 2.0 (six more are supported but not available out-of-the-box), two gigabit LAN, one serial, one LPT, two PS/2 ports, along with 7.1 channel audio with both optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs.
We managed to get this board to work at 4-4-4-12-1T, which was a very pleasant surprise. Near the end of the test, however, we noticed some quirks, particularly in Quake 4 and WinRAR tests, where the board crashed. It did manage to complete both tests in a second attempt so we decided to keep the scores, but it is worth mentioning nevertheless. We do expect a more up to date BIOS version to correct these issues.
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