The future of Socket 754 is rather slim at this point in time. After AMD announced its Socket 939, the platform that started the era of 64-bit computing quickly started to fade out. And while Socket 939 is currently the attention worthy component of choice, it would be a safe assumption to consider Socket 754 as today’s Athlon XP, which stayed the desired platform for budget buyers for quite some time. Although AMD has publicly announced the fate of Socket 754, it is still a worthy edition to today’s market standards. The only drawback is that you will have to deal with motherboards that were announced in September 2003 or throughout 2004. Motherboard makers are most likely not going to concentrate on this platform anymore, but it still has a decent lifespan when you take into consideration the memory standards it supports, the storage technologies such as SATA/IDE, standard PCI and graphics adapters in AGP mode.

This week we are going to concentrate on a few Socket 754 motherboards that were introduced earlier in the 64-bit computing days. Even though the motherboard being evaluated today was one of the first ones, it would still be interesting to see where it holds today, which is the whole point of this evaluation. Now that our expectations for mature products have risen since its launch, maybe some of the older motherboards can prove to be a perfect mixture of budget computing on demand.

MSI has a tradition to bring quality products ever since its existence. The company quickly rose to tier one position after launching products that became the rage throughout the history. MSI’s K8T-Neo FSR is a budget motherboard to begin with; therefore, our expectations are not that high. That being said, it’s one of the most affordable boards in the market and for those who are looking to take advantage of this fact might want to consider it by the end of the evaluation.

Throughout our look at Socket 754 boards this week, we have decided to evaluate some of the earliest boards as well as some of the latest ones. In our opinion, this would create an interesting outlook on the standards when 64-bit computing first launched and where it stands right now. We must say that there is quite a difference in earlier boards to the ones that were announced at a later date (as far as performance is concerned). How well does the K8T-Neo performs against its newer counterparts? Read on and find out…

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

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