MSI P35 Neo2-FR: Platinum performance for under $100
by Gary Key on December 5, 2007 11:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Gaming Performance
As usual, we test gaming performance with a variety of (nearly - we'll be updating soon!) current games. We run our benchmarks at 1280x1024 with high quality settings.
Battlefield 2
This benchmark utilized DICE's built-in demo playback functionality with additional capture capabilities designed in-house. During the benchmark, the camera switches between players and vehicles in order to capture the most action possible. There is a significant amount of smoke, explosions, and vehicle usage; the benchmark is sensitive to GPU and to a lesser extent CPU selections.
Company of Heroes
Company of Heroes arrived last year and remains one of the best samples of the genre. The game is extremely GPU intensive and requires a hefty CPU as well. The game contains a built-in performance test that utilizes the game engine to generate several different action scenes. We find the performance test gives a good indication of how well your system will perform throughout the game. We use the DX9 codepath, as DX10 performance suffers even on the fastest current systems.
Prey
Prey offers some superb action sequences, unique weapons and characters, and is a visually stunning game at times. It still requires a very good GPU to run it with all of the eye candy turned on. We set all graphic settings to their maximum except for AA/AF and utilize a custom timedemo that takes place during one of the more action-oriented sequences.
Supreme Commander
Supreme Commander is one of the favorite real time strategy games around the office and requires both a very good CPU and GPU when playing the game at anything above 1024x768 with decent settings. We utilize the game's built-in benchmark for our results.
Gaming Summary
The Neo2-FR board's overall performance is very consistent throughout our game testing. During game play testing with Crysis, UT3, and Quake Wars, the board performed superbly. We would not hesitate to recommend this board as a stable and inexpensive choice for a gaming platform.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
35 Comments
View All Comments
DigitalFreak - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
I sincerely hope that the USB port block on the back is supported by more than just that tiny riser. That thing looks like it would break off if you looked at it funny.Griswold - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
Nothing to worry about, unless some clumsy fool or 8 year old child rams the USB plug in.superkdogg - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
Reading the introduction about the surprising performance of the new MSI board got my ears up, but then I read the article and it was more of the same.Every motherboard performs virtually the same these days at stock speeds. The only things that differentiate anything is overclocking/bios, reliability, layout, price, extra features (if you need them), and personal brand preference.
Motherboard 'reviews' could pretty much be replaced by a table that tells a consumer about those things above. Benchmarking showing that everything is +/- 2% from the median just eats up space.
j@cko - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
LOL. I totally agree with ya. Motherboard review nowadays is more about reliability and overclockability, I think.JarredWalton - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
The problem is, if we were to eliminate all of the benchmarking, how do we really know if a board is reliable? If you haven't noticed, 90% or something of the text on the benchmark pages is filler - the graphs pretty much say everything you need to know. Anyway, doing motherboard reviews can be a thankless endeavor, but we still think it's necessary. We're not quite at the "necessary evil" stage either. :)brian_riendeau - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
Its quite easy really to show the effectiveness of a mobo design without wasting 5 pages on graphs that show no difference between 10 models of motherboards.Test the motherboards in harsh environments. No one really cares if their board is 1% faster than another board, however they will care if their whole system crashes repeatedly if their AC goes out and the room temp gets up to 90F.
drebo - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
Death of the P35 Neo-F, one of the best mid-range boards ever made. For $85 you get a superb P35 board, but they're not making it anymore. Moving to this board, you lose Parallel and Serial ports, which for many general home users are very important.Intel doesn't make a P35 board with parallel or serial, and ASUS's P5K board is about $40 more expensive. I really wish a tier 1 manufacturer would come out with another good board. The last couple generations it's been MSI, with the P965 Neo3-F and then the P35 Neo-F. Looks as though there won't be a P35 Neo2-F, unfortunately. They're making a hybrid DDR2/DDR3 board instead, which neuters any kind of RAM upgrades for the end users because you can only use one or the other, not both, and neither in a dual-channel configuration.
Oh well. Maybe ASUS will drop the price of their P5K board.
Ratinator - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
[quote]Moving to this board, you lose Parallel and Serial ports, which for many general home users are very important. [/quote]Did you mean not very important?
drebo - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
No, I didn't. You'd be surprised how many people at home have serial mice they don't want to replace (old trackballs that they're too stubborn to get rid of) and parallel printers. A lot of people in the business world need them, too. They need parallel for printers and serial to run machines off of, or for their PDAs, or for other reasons.There needs to be a good midrange board that still supports these legacy devices, and with the P35 Neo-F going by the wayside, that board just doesn't exist anymore.
brian_riendeau - Thursday, December 6, 2007 - link
I am sorry to inform you of this, however not many people shopping for new motherboards for business or personal use care about serial and parallel ports. You just gotta let things go man... Anyone who really needs to use a legacy port can pickup USB port -> legacy port adapters for cheap if they really need to use old hardware. We have a whole department of people where I work still chained to serial devices, however they all have C2D and Quad core PCs now and just use USB adapters.