MSI is a well-respected name when it comes to high quality PC components. We evaluated the company’s K8T-FSR motherboard yesterday, and today we have an improved version of the very same board, K8T-FIS2R. If you read through our assessment of the FSR board, you will find the performance between the two boards to be fairly similar to each other. In fact, it’s safe enough to call the performance almost identical in all scenarios. Therefore, we have decided to skip the general board layout, BIOS, overclocking, and performance tests from this evaluation and focus on just the features that set this board apart from its predecessor. If you are interested in reading more about the FSR and FIS2R boards, we highly suggest you read through our in-depth article from yesterday to catch up on features and other concluding differences. You can dub this evaluation as a mini-review of the exact same board, except with more features.

The only difference between the FSR and FIS2R is the implementation of an additional disk controller and Firewire. Instead of limiting the support for IDE and SATA drives with only RAID 0 and 1 (VIA 8237), MSI decided to opt for Promise 20378 onboard disk controller, which will additionally support two SATA and two IDE drives along with RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 functionalities. The Firewire connection will be supported via VIA’s VT6037 IEEE1394 controller. This feature will surely come in handy for those with Mini-DV cams or the like. Other than what’s stated here, the rest of the board is an exact replica of its FSR counterpart.

As far as the performance is concerned, the FIS2R doesn’t show much of an improvement in any of our tests. Since this version is equipped with more features, you would expect it to cost higher than FSR, but interestingly that’s not the case. The prices for KT800 boards have fallen so far that there isn’t much of a difference between the high-end and more economic class boards anymore, at least this is the case with the ones that were launched with Athlon 64 platform initially. The MSI K8T-FIS2R is a worthy contender for anyone who is looking to build a system on a strict budget, and for the approximate price of $60.00, this is definitely the board to get over its FSR equivalent.

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