I don't think it's much of a stretch to go out and say that the nForce 2 is currently the best performing AMD platform available. Unlike the launch of the original nForce, the successor has a lot of industry support, and it should be no problem finding some flavor of nForce 2.

Knowing that, the shopper faces a mini dilemma where they'll have to sort through which nForce 2 will best suit their needs. Questions such as stability, and speed come to mind, but for the most part, all of the boards perform within a few percentage points of one another. No, that won't do. There needs to be a bit more to sway a shopper to consider one brand over another. Good overclocking ability is a natural requirement, as is any extra features would also be nice. Finally, all this has to be packaged in a price they can afford.

MSI is one such company that tries to meet the above criteria with their motherboards. Though MSI may not be number one in any one area, you could always count on them to provide a solid package at a reasonable price, when compared to its competition. The MSI K7N2G-ILSR is one of those packages where if there's any PCB space, it's going to get used by something. This particular board is also the first one we've had a chance to look at with the nForce 2 Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP). We're not going to dig too deep into the nForce 2 itself, but you can get more info from our nForce 2 preview, and our Epox 8RDA+ review for the full scoop.

Specifications

CPU: Supports Socket A for AMD® Athlon™/Athlon™ XP/Duron™ processors @FSB 100/133/166

Chipset: nVIDIA® nForce2 IGP Chipset
- Integrated TV encoder
- Supports DDR266/333 with internal graphic core, DDR266/333/400 with external add-on card
- AGP 3.0 8x interface at 533MHz

nVIDIA® nForce2 MCP-T Chipset
- AC97 Interface supporting up to two concurrent codecs
- Ultra ATA133 for the fastest hard disk throughput
- USB 2.0 EHCI/1.1 OHCI controller
- FireWire® and USB 2.0 for the fastest digital connectivity
- Audio Processing Unit(APU) encodes audio in Dolby® Digital 5.1 format for full surround sound effects

Main Memory
Supports six memory banks using three 184-pin DDR DIMMs
Supports up to 3GB PC3200/2700/2100/1600 DDR SDRAMs
Supports both 64-bit and 128-bit DDR SDRAM

SLOTS
One AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) 1.5V 4x/8x slot
Five 32-bit PCI bus slots (support 3.3v/5v PCI bus interface)
One ACR (Advanced Communication Riser) slot

On-Board IDE
An IDE controller on the MCP2/MCP2-T chipset provides IDE HDD/CDROM with PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA133/100/66 operation modes
Can connect up to four IDE devices

Serial ATA Interface
Support 2 serial ATA plus 1 ATA133
- RAID O or 1 are supported
- RAID function works w/ATA133+SATA H/D or 2 SATA H/D
Connect up to 2 Serial ATA devices and 1 ATA133 device

On-Board Peripherals
- 1 floppy port that supports two FDD with 360KB, 720KB,1.44MB and 2.88MB
- 1 serial port and 1 VGA port
- 1 parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode
- 3 audio ports in vertical
- 2 IEEE1394 connectors
- 6 USB ports (Rear * 4/ Front * 2)
- 1 RJ-45 jack

As we can see from the specifications, MSI packs every nForce 2 feature into its flagship AMD motherboard. Other than the motherboard features, there are plenty of extras such as the D Bracket 2, the S Bracket, a FireWire (1394) bracket and a TV-out external bracket.

All of this is contained in a very attractive box, with the familiar MSI motorcycle adorning the cover. You also get some DVD software, drivers, and a couple of manuals. Only one IDE cable is included, along with one floppy. Since this is a SATA RAID capable motherboard, it's nice that MSI included at least two SATA cables.

The Board

To breakdown the MSI K7N2G-ILSR naming convention, the K7N2 indicates it's an Athlon nForce 2 motherboard. The "G" stands for graphics, courtesy of the nForce 2 IGP. The "I" is for IEEE1394 (FireWire), "L" for LAN, and the "SR" is Serial ATA RAID.

As with all of MSI's motherboards, the K7N2G-ILSR sports the trademark red PCB. Case window fans will appreciate the extra touch by MSI of colouring the memory slots purple and green. Other than looking fancy, the colour scheme serves a somewhat functional purpose, which we'll get into later on.

Focusing on the CPU area, the first observation we can make is the lack of the four mounting holes for the installation of some heatsinks, notably the Swiftech and Alpha. This follows AMD's newer specifications, which do away with this method of installation. Although the omission of the holes is a bit of a downer, there are a few heatsinks out right now that perform on par with the Swiftech MCX462+. I am also aware that some water cooling setups will not work now since the mounting holes are gone, but the Swiftech H20-8500 kit will work without any problems.

The capacitors surrounding the socket are a little close for comfort, but I had no problems fitting our Thermalright SLK-800, arguably one of the larger heatsinks on the market. For power, there are two connections to be aware of. MSI has included both the standard ATX power connection, as well as the auxiliary connection typically found in P4 motherboards. Considering the number of integrated features, as well as the power demands of overclocking, this was a wise decision on MSI's part to add the extra power connection for the CPU.

The one criticism I do have is the fact that the positioning is somewhat awkward. To begin with, the power is in our least favorite position as it will cause your main power cables to be within proximity of the CPU heatsink/fan. I also had a bit of trouble disconnecting the main connection since it rested in between the capacitors and the back I/O panel. You don't need to do anything like removing the motherboard to disconnect power, but those of you with larger hands will probably curse a couple times as I did when trying to jimmy the power cable out.

The nForce 2 IGP, which provides GeForce 4 MX graphics, is actively cooled by a nice heatsink and fan. This will add a bit of noise of course, but active cooling is a better choice than passive cooling when it comes to overclocking. Speaking of passive, the heatsinks on the Mosfets are a nice touch since I guess there's no such thing as too much cooling.

I liked the fact that the AGP slot was red, but am at a loss at why MSI didn't used coloured PCI slots as well. The AGP slot has the typical AGP card clip to help secure your video card if you tend to move your PC around a lot. Unlike past motherboards, MSI included, the clip doesn't interfere with the memory slot clips. There's plenty of clearance where even if you used a Ti4600, you won't have to remove it to get the memory out.

As mentioned before, the memory banks are colour coded. These colours are mostly for cosmetic purposes, but they also serve to help indicate how you should install ram. Since one of the big features of the nForce 2 is the DualDDR architecture, you'll want to install two DIMMs, rather than one. Having two purple DIMMs side-by-side doesn't make it obvious where the ram should go though (but it is explained in the manual). At first glance, some people may think both modules go into the purple slots, but in fact, one goes into the purple, and one goes into the green.

In the bottom half of the board, we have the IDE connections. There are three connections, one of which is reserved for RAID. I don't know if they ran out of ink or something (note the sarcasm), but only IDE1, and IDE3 are marked, but there isn't anything that says IDE2. I suppose it's obvious anyways, but what do I know?

For integration, we have the nForce 2 MCP-T Southbridge, and the Promise PDC20376 SATA150 controller. The MCP-T is responsible for Ethernet 10/100 support, FireWire, USB 2.0, ATA133, and AC'97 Audio. The Soundstorm Audio Processing Unit is also included, which is a nice touch on MSI's part. The Soundstorm APU is capable of producing 5.1 stereo surround sound, doing all the Dolby Digital encoding in hardware.

The Promise PDC20376 SATA150 controller allows you to plug in up to two Serial ATA drives, and setup a RAID configuration. Though SATA hasn't exactly become the mainstream desktop standard, the industry is moving in that direction, so this addition to the MSI K7N2G-ILSR will only further future-proof your board.

Rounding things out is the back I/O panel. We got your standard PS/2 connections, four USB connections, a LAN port, serial and parallel connections, and the sound and VGA connections. MSI also includes brackets for two more USB connections, a TV-out and FireWire, which was mentioned earlier.

The BIOS

The Pheonix AwardBIOS makes another appearance, and provides a good number of options for the user to play with. You have your typical screens for the Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Power Management Setup, as well as the ability to default to the BIOS defaults or the performance defaults. For the tweakers, you'll be interested in the next few screens we'll be demonstrating.

The Advanced Chipset Features is where you'll find the first steps in tweaking out your box. You'll have to switch the System Performance tab to "Manual", which will unlock the factory defaults. The FSB options are pretty good, allowing for 1MHz changes, up to 200MHz. Although that should be enough for most people, I would have liked to have seen a higher FSB ceiling for those of you who wish to be extremely adventurous. The only thing that did annoy me here is the fact that you cannot key in a FSB value, and you'll have to scroll through the FSB numbers until you get to the one you want.

The memory settings are very flexible, allowing the user to set their ram to run synchronous to the FSB, or asynchronous if they're only concerned about overclocking the ram itself. You also have access to four memory timing options, which will let you run either with aggressive timings, or something more conservative if stability becomes a concern.

You'll also have access to your AGP setting here. A tip for those of you with game crashes… disable the System BIOS and Video Ram Cacheable options. We're not using DOS anymore, and there's no reason for those to be enabled.

Being able to mess around with multipliers and frequencies is great, but it won't do you any good if you can never get by the POST screen. This is where the Frequency/Voltage Control comes in. First of all, if you're going to be serious about overclocking, you're going to have to unlock that multiplier. One sore spot was where the Epox 8RDA+ unlocks the Tbred CPU without modification; it wasn't the case for the MSI K7N2G-ILSR. I'll explain how to get around this when we get into the overclocking.

Voltage options are a mixed bag. The CPU voltage can go as high as 1.8v, which isn't bad, but it's not the greatest. The DIMM voltage adjustments were a disappointment, as we couldn't go any higher than 2.7v. As all enthusiasts know, tweaking the voltages are a necessity when trying to get the most out of their system, and I felt that MSI held back a little here.

Overclocking

Given the voltage adjustment limitations, I wasn't expecting too much when we got down to overclocking our TBred 2400+. As mentioned earlier, the MSI K7N2G-ILSR will not unlock an unmodified TBred. Sure, you can make multiplier changes in the BIOS regardless, but your system won't boot. I will write up a future unlocking article, but in the meantime, you'll have to connect a bridge as pictured below.

The L3, #5 bridge is the one you're interested in. Bridging that will unlock the multipliers 13 and under.

The first order of business is to lower the multiplier to a level that we can maximize our FSB. As usual, we move the FSB in small increments until we reach a point of instability. At a multiplier of 8x, we were able to hit 198. The system would POST at 199, but Windows became so badly corrupted, a reformat was in order. After the reinstallation, I tried a multiplier of 7x, but we were not able to get by 199. Seeing how the ceiling is 200FSB, I called it a day for FSB overclocking, and begun pushing the multiplier up (at 198FSB) to see what was the maximum multiplier/FSB overclock we were able to manage.

11x198 was the best we were able to manage with the 2400+. Although I was satisfied that we managed a decent FSB overclock, I had hoped for better luck with the multiplier. 11.5 would not POST, but I should note that things were rock solid at 11x198.

Important Note: During the course of overclocking, we ended up killing the K7N2G-ILSR while doing some memory overclocking. During the overclocking attempts mentioned earlier, our Corsair TWINX PC3200 was running syncronous with the FSB. This didn't cause any problems, and I should note that we had an ATi 9700 Pro installed during this time (I'll get to why this is important in a minute).

Soon after, I needed to do some testing with the onboard video, so the 9700 Pro was removed. By default, the K7N2G-ILSR has the DDR running at PC2700. Naturally, I wanted to run the ram at its rated speed, so I set the memory timings at 400MHz. This wasn't a problem, until I started pushing the ram harder.

When you are overclocking, there can be serious problems with the K7N2G-ILSR if you choose to overclock the ram with the IGP enabled.

Basically, if you intend to use the IGP, you are limiting your memory FSB at 333MHz... at least, you are supposed to. Running your memory at 400MHz is essentially overclocking, since that memory is needed by the IGP. What you're supposed to do if you plan on overclocking the memory is to plug a video card into the IGP slot, thus disabling the IGP. When I killed the first review board, I only went for a 205MHz (410MHz DDR) memory overclock with 200MHz Corsair PC3200. Hardly what I would call extreme.

In short, if you are going to use onboard video... you should run your memory at PC2700. This is not to say it won't work at PC3200, but I wouldn't chance it. I was able to run a number of benchmarks with the ram at PC3200, but with the jump to 410MHz, it was enough to PERMANENTLY kill the BIOS. Trust me, no amount of resetting fixed this. MSI even followed nVidia's specifications by including a 100/133FSB jumper reset, but this did not help at all.

Update: I wanted to add that this problem isn't addressed in the manual, but MSI does state only DDR266/333 is supported when using the IGP. However, it is my opinion that there should be safety measures in place should one wish to use DDR3200 and up. Perhaps hard locking the ram at PC2700 or something. Ultimately, this was an error on my part, but judging from the responses we've gotten the last 24 hours, I'm not the only one who did this.

You're going to have to keep in mind that this is not necessarily a MSI issue, but rather, it seems to be a common problem for any nForce 2 with IGP. Don't take my word for it though, as you can find this problem documented in , at , and at .

Test Setup

MSI K7N2G-ILSR nForce2: Athlon XP 2400+ provided by (15x133: 2.0GHz, 12x166: 1.992GHz), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.0, ATi Catalyst 3.2

Epox 8RDA+ nForce2: Athlon XP 2400+ provided by HighSpeed PC (15x133: 2.0GHz, 12x166: 1.992GHz), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.0, ATi Catalyst 3.2

Test software will be:

SiSoft Sandra 2003
PC Mark 2002
PiFast
3D Mark 2001SE
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Jedi Knight 2

We're going to be doing our game benchmarks a little differently than we normally do for motherboard reviews. We will be running all the game benchmarks first, with the 9700 Pro, at 640x480, at low quality settings. The exception will be 3D Mark 2001SE, which will be run at 1024x768, default settings. The second group of tests will be at 1024x768 and up with the built in IGP. Games will be run at high quality settings, with the exception of 3D Mark, which will be at default.

Comparison motherboard will be the Epox 8RDA+ nForce 2. Benchmarks will be run at the 2400+ stock speed of 2GHz (133FSB), as well as at a 166FSB with a 12x multiplier.

 

SiSoftware Sandra 2003

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

Memory Benchmark

So far, we can see there is little difference between the Epox 8RDA+ and the MSI K7N2G-ILSR. Neither boards hold any tangible advantage over the other, which isn't surprising since both use the same chipset. Now, keep in mind that during testing, we're using an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and not the IGP. When using the IGP, it will cut into the total memory, so how is memory performance when using the IGP?

	With 9700 Pro	With nForce2 IGP
K7N2G-ILSR Ram Int. Buff. @ 166	2389	2256

Using 64MB of system ram, overall memory performance is deminished somewhat. If you're looking for maximum memory performance, you're best to use a dedicated video card, but even when using the IGP, performance is not bad at all.

PC Mark 2002

Pretty close across the board, but the MSI holds a slight lead at both bus speeds.

PiFast

New to our testbed, but a good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory.

Lower is Better

This is a real-world benchmark, and will stress the memory subsystem. The MSI board continues to lead the Epox as we progress through the benchmarks.

3D Mark 2001SE, 1024x768 - Default

3D Mark is one of those benchmark apps that will eat up as much processing power as it can. Benchmarks were run at default 1024x768, as I felt 640x480 is getting to be fairly pointless.

No real difference, but I suppose if "benchmarking" is your cup of tea, the MSI continues to lead the Epox.

Unreal Tournament 2003

I've been playing around with the retail version of UT2K3 for quite sometime now, and have been pretty impressed with the graphics. It's a real system killer, and can bring many pre-2002 killer rigs to its knees. We used the scripts written by , which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test, which uses the dm-inferno map.

Dead even this time around. Neither board will let you down if gaming is your thing.

Quake 3 Arena, 640x480 - Fastest

It's getting old, I know, but Quake 3 is still a decent benchmark for almost anything. For motherboards and CPUs, we run at the lowest settings and fire away.

It's not a large difference, but the Epox ends it's benchmark losing streak by pulling out a win here.

Jedi Knight 2, 640x480 - Fastest

As with Quake 3, the Epox holds down the fort again. To be honest, both boards are essentially the same when it comes down to the numbers game. One thing the K7N2G has that the 8RDA+ doesn't is the IGP, so let's see how that does.

IGP Benchmarks

Since I'm sure a few of you may be considering this motherboard as an overall replacement to your current mobo and video card, I've included some benchmarks so you can get an idea of the performance with the nVidia IGP. All video tests will be with the IGP configured at 128MB, and at the highest image quality available in the game options. The exception is 3D Mark 2001SE, which will be run at default.

3D Mark 2001SE, Default Settings, No AA

Quake 3 Arena

Jedi Knight II

Nothing too notable, and performance differences between the resolution is expected. At 1024x768, with no AntiAliasing, framerates are very playable, though at 1600x1200, things will get choppy.

Unreal Tournament 2003

Up until now, we've been using a 128MB buffer for the IGP, so I wanted to do a small comparison when using a 32MB buffer. This will free up more ram for your system, but will it affect the benchmarks?

The difference isn't large with the Antalus benchmark, but with the more memory intensive Inferno benchmark, we can see that the extra 96MB of ram makes a more noticable difference.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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