MSI P35 Neo2-FR: Platinum performance for under $100

MSI P35 Neo2-FR Specifications

MSI designed the P35 Neo2-FR for the enthusiast user on a budget. The BIOS options available are extensive for a board in this price category and place an emphasis on overclocking. MSI provides the standard laundry list of board options such as the Marvell 88SE6111 for eSATA and IDE support, optional IEEE 1394 support from VIA on the FIR board, decent onboard audio support from the Realtek ALC888T, 12 USB ports, Intel Matrix RAID, and Gigabit LAN support from the ubiquitous Realtek RTL8111B chipset.

The board offers a very good mix of expansion slots. Utilizing a CrossFire setup will create the physical loss of a PCI and PCI Express slot with dual-slot cards, but we still recommend utilizing the 975X or X38 chipsets for CrossFire operation. We ran a few early tests with a QX9650 Yorkfield CPU and the board operated fine. MSI has not finished fully tuning the BIOS for Yorkfield, but they should in the near future. Speaking of the BIOS, its design has not changed from the P35 Platinum, nor have the options - something we dearly wish that MSI would address in their next product release. It's not that bad, but the layout could be better and additional auto settings would be welcome in the memory timing section.

MSI includes several Windows utility programs, with Dual Core Center and Live Update being the two major applications. Just like the majority of utility programs from most manufacturers, they are somewhat interesting to look at for a few minutes, but we quickly removed them from our system to utilize third party programs for tuning and measurements. We also had a problem updating our BIOS from 1.3 to 1.6 with the Live Update program. The BIOS update completed normally and our system rebooted as planned. However, it would not POST correctly after several on/off episodes. Thinking the board might be dead, we decided to try a couple of options before contacting MSI. We switched out our processor to the E2160 and the board booted fine. We set the BIOS to defaults, shutdown, inserted the Q6600, and it started right back up.

Attempting to replicate the problem, we tried the Live Update procedure on an MSI P35 Platinum board when upgrading from the engineering BIOS to an early public release. We did not have a problem there, but we did when upgrading to the latest BIOS. This time, we set the FSB jumpers on the board to 200 and it went straight through the POST routine. The only thing we can think of is that the FSB rates are not being set correctly after the flash routine. However, we did not have a single problem flashing with the DOS utility.