Board Layout:

As we have stated earlier, the board is definitely unique in many regards as far as the placement of components is concerned. Unlike the other board layouts, MSI has taken a different approach with its K8N Neo Platinum. The top right corner contains the 12v power connector along with MOSFETS that are thermally dissipated via aluminum heatsinks. Theoretically, having heatsinks on MOSFETS should improve stability of the board when the system is overclocked. Moving towards the right of the MOSFETS is a row of capacitors. What you will notice here is that the capacitors are completely cleared from the socket area, which leaves ample room around the socket for heatsinks that are generally larger in size.

Underneath the row of capacitors are two SATA ports and a 3-pin fan connector. Generally, the board layout around the top is fairly nice, and shouldn’t pose too many issues in most cases. However, we are not delighted with the SATA connector location. It’s the same case with majority of NF3 based boards, and we have no clue as to why many manufacturers opted for this. There are quite a few things that will interfere with proper connectivity of the SATA cables to the drives. Many SATA cables are small in length, which will make it hard for users with large cases to fairly utilize these ports. Even if you happen to have a case that can work well with such a layout, you will have to route the cable from the top of the graphics adapter and the heatsink in order to connect it to the drive. Although this isn’t too serious, it will certainly be an issue of concern for those who like to manage their system cables. While MSI isn’t the only one to be blamed here, it certainly deserves to be criticized because if it can change the placement of DIMM slots, the socket and the northbridge then it can certainly work with the SATA connectors to remedy the issue.

The socket area is clean and should not pose compatibility issues with large heatsinks, namely from Thermalright and the latest from Thermaltake. The three single channel DIMM slots are situated right above the socket, and support DDR400/333/266 memory standards. The DIMM slots can only have 2GB with DDR400, but 3GB with DDR333. MSI’s CoreCell chip is located right besides the memory slots, which is where it’s located normally. CoreCell is MSI’s temperature monitoring software, an offering similar to what other motherboard makers offer.

The two IDE ports are located besides the socket, and are color-coded yellow. We would’ve preferred the IDE connectors to be right next to each other instead of their current position. The stacked position makes it difficult to connect and disconnect the drives with ease. But apparently, there isn’t much space around this area where MSI could’ve worked on this. The 20-pin main power connector is located right under the IDE connectors. Needless to say, this area will be quite populated with wires of various sorts.

While moving towards the bottom of the board, you will find an additional 3-pin fan connector, two more SATA ports, a floppy connector and color-coded main connector pins. All four SATA connectors have an assortment of RAID functionalities that include IDE, SATA or SATA + IDE drives in RAID 0, 1 or 0+1. The storage options are all well and good. The floppy connector location, however, is discouraging, to say the least. Once again, everything depends on the case and its size, but in many cases you will have a difficult time routing the cable from the floppy connector to the drive itself; it’s located too far on the board.

The core logic is situated in the center of the board with a passive cooler. We don’t have any complaints regarding its placement, but we are not pleased with the passive cooler. During our testing, we noticed that the passive heatsink was fairly warm, which leads us to believe that it might cause problems during overclocking.

Here’s a better look at the two SATA ports on the left in conjunction to the AGP slot and the socket. The MSI K8N Neo Platinum board offers an 8x AGP slots with five 32-bit PCI slots.

The I/O panel of the board offers two PS/2 connectors; one for the mouse and other for the keyboard, a parallel port, one serial port, one audio jack with SPDIF out, eight USB 2.0 ports, one RJ45 jack for LAN functionality, and three IEEE Firewire ports. The IEEE is supported by VIA’s VT6306 controller while the 7.1 audio channel is supported by Realtek’s ALC850 controller. All in all, the board has a solid layout with little kinks that are present in almost all NF3 boards.

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