AM2 MBO Round-up: Part VII - MSI K9N Neo
Author: Josip Brombauer
Date: 18 Dec 2006

MSI K9N Neo
That K9N Neo (nForce 550 based) is the baby brother of K9N Ultra becomes apparent as soon as you put these two boards next to each other. K9N Neo has a visibly smaller PCB, about 6 cm shorter in width, so the layoyut is noticeably different. Gone is the molex connector, there?s one less PCI Express x1 slot and two less SATA ports (four total). Again, the positioning of the SATA ports will render one of them unusable when a two-slot graphics card is installed. But much more annoying is the CMOS clear jumper (yes, sadly there?s no convenient button on this board) placed right above the top SATA port, so each time you need to reset the BIOS you must first remove the GPU.
The I/O panel is a bit different, too. You get one LAN port less and no digital outputs, everything else is there.
Getting this board to work at 1T proved futile. So we went back to the 4-4-4-12-2T settings.

With one PCI-Express x16, two PCI-Express x1 and three PCI slots (the last PCI-slot is for special card like a combo of wireless card and Bluetooth card), upgradeability looks good.Of course, there's an array of other useful stuff: IDE interface, four Serial ATA ports (RAID 0, 1, 0+1), 7.1 sound system (Realtek ALC883), Gigabit LAN (Vitesse VSC8601) and the usual connectors at the backpanel - 2xPS/2 (keyboard, mouse), Parallel and Serial port, 4 USB 2.0 ports and network port. Everything seems to be there.