MSI 865P Neo

Intro

Intel has created an enemy for it's own i875, or Canterwood, chipset with the i865, or Springdale. With a number of companies enabling the PAT supposedly exclusive to the i875, many people are ending up with a Canterwood eqivalent for roughly half the price. A few other sites have good reason to believe that this PAT trick won't last forever, considering what Intel has done to products that people are getting too much extra performance from. Regardless of what happens, the Springdale chipset remains a solid pick for those wanting a solid base for their Pentium 4 setup without forking over a hefty chunk of change.

MSI has an intresting little board, the 865P Neo, based on the 865P chipset. It's still Springdale, but it lacks official support for the 800MHz FSB cpu's. In the manual, MSI claims 800MHz FSB support, but we'll get to that later. The other thing that's a little odd is pairing the 865P with the not-so new ICH4. The i865 can be paired with ICH5 or ICH5R, but MSI chose not to use this, and likely to keep the costs down. As you'll see shortly, this is a no frills board, so don't look here for extra goodies like SATA RAID or a high-end audio solution.

As usual, it's time to list the specs of this board for all the world to see.

• i865P chipset
  
• ICH4
  
• 1x 4x/8x AGP
  
• 6x PCI
  
• Dual ATA100 controllers
  
• Socket 478
  
• 2 184-Pin DIMMs
  
• C-Media AC'97 codec
  
• Realtek 8101L (optional)
  
• 400/533/800MHz FSB (800 by overclocking)
  

As shown, this is about as bare as they come, although I think LAN should be standard in this day and age, especially considering that the ICH4 already has a embedded NIC controller.