After taking a look at seven socket 754 boards late last month, we have established the fact that the 754 platform is the budget system to be had. Though its life span is limited to the point where AMD will stop the production of its current 754 microprocessors, and replace it with 64-bit Sempron chips, it still doesn’t change the platform’s value in the market. Throughout those seven evaluations, we saw revised chipsets, observed new board layouts and noticed extreme performance differences from one board to another. However, what was interesting to note were their respected price points. Majority of the boards retailed for well under $100.00 and performed exceptionally well.

Also in the evaluations, we tested boards based on VIA’s ancient K8T800, an improved K8T800 Pro and NVIDIA’s 250 and 250Gb NF3 chipsets. The K8T800 showed horrendous performance, but that’s to be expected, since it was the very first chipset in the market to support AMD’s 64-bit chips back in late 2003. It’s better version, the K8T800 Pro, did exceptionally well and was a solid match against the NF3. But we picked NVIDIA’s NF3 as our top choice as an all rounder chipset. It’s not that the K8T800 Pro doesn’t match the NF3, but NVIDIA offers much better, updated and useful solutions onboard while VIA is limited in that regard. Even today, VIA combines its northbridge with its 8237 southbridge, which is one of the key reasons as to why VIA is so behind when it comes to features. While they offer competitive performance, their onboard features falter to low depths.

MSI has been producing quality boards for quite a while now. Not only are they stable, but they excel in overclocking just as well. In fact, MSI boards have been fairly popular for extreme overclocking results lately. Today, we have yet another socket 754 offering based on the high-end NF3 250Gb chipset. The results match Asus’ K8N-E Deluxe board, which is integrated with the same chipset. The only performance difference between the two is that they trade places for the top positions for the ultimate win. The reason obviously is due to the marginal differences in each round of tests.

The MSI K8N Neo Platinum is saturated with a unique layout. However, its performance is similar to Asus’ K8N-E Deluxe, does it have what it takes to be the ultimate winner? Read on and find out…

Looking for more motherboards, check out Newegg.com for more choices.

Next