Today we are going to have a look at the MSI K8N Neo Nforce 3 250Gb chipset based motherboard. This is their mainstream Nforce 3 motherboard for AMD socket 754. The K8N Neo is not capable of running in Dual channel mode so if that is a must have feature then perhaps look towards the K8N Neo Ultra based on AMD's socket 939 technology.

While this is a mainstream board it still has many nice features like SATA and software RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). Please note that users cannot install either Win ME or Win98, on their SATA hard drives. Under these two OS's, SATA can only be used as a storage device.

Specification:

  • Supports Socket-754 for AMD K8 Athlon™ 800 MHz Hypertransport interface
  • Supports single memory channel, DDR 400/333/266 without ECC support
  • Supports AGP 4X/8X
  • ATX Form Factor: 24.4 cm (L) x 30.5 cm (W)
  • 9 mounting holes
  • Integrated Serial ATA interface: dual channel 4 S-ATA RAID controller and dual channel ATA 133/100/66/33 master mode EIDE controller
  • Integrated nVIDIA MAC for Gigabit LAN supports 10 Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and 1000 Mb/s auto-negotiation operation
  • Realtek ALC850 7.1-channel audio codec

Below you can see that there is an onboard RJ45 connector, optional firewire port, S/PDIF connection, 4 USB ports and an optical S/PDIF Out. The left three audio jacks are for 2-channel mode for stereo speaker output. The line out can be used to connect either your speakers or headphones while in 2 channel mode, while the line In is used for an external CD player, or other audio devices. There is also an advanced Realtek ALC850 audio application that offers support for 7.1-channel audio by turning the rear audio connectors from 2-channel to multi-channel audio.

 

Next: Test Setup

 

 

 

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