Overclocking Performance

Given the problems we had overclocking, the K8T Neo still gives a significant performance boost when you bump up the FSB speed. Below are some of our results.

TMPGEnc @ 217FSB

Lower times are better

PiFast @ 217FSB

Lower times are better

The 17MHz OC nets us an improvement of 19 seconds in MPEG-1 encoding and almost four seconds in PiFast. Those numbers may appear to be small, but remember that larger files or Pi computations will pass those improvements appropriately.

Final Words

Early samples of the K8T Neo-FIS2R had its share of problems upon its initial release, and it would appear that the board is much more mature now. One improvement was in the overclocking arena, though there are still limitations, either in the VIA chipset, or in the A64 itself. Performance of the K8T/A64 was excellent, at stock and overclocked.

For those of you who are looking into a heavily integrated solution, the K8T Neo-FIS2R does not disappoint. With dual RAID, courtesy of the VIA and Promise controllers, storage junkies are well taken care of. Despite being a PCI solution, the Promise controller performs very well. The audio solution is passable, and is well suited for general use, but the quality is not as good as VIA's own Envy. Why MSI passed on that, I'm not too sure. Gigabit Ethernet is present, and I expect to see more motherboards add it in as a standard, ather than as a feature in future boards. Add five PCI slots to the mix, and you're well covered if your needs change.

There were some issues experienced during testing that did bother us though. The first thing I noticed was during Windows installation, you are required to insert a RAID driver disk for the VIA controller should you choose to use the VIA SATA/PATA. The Promise controller is a given, but the VIA disk was a surprise, as I had packed away my floppy drive long ago. Some blame can go to Microsoft for forcing people to keep their floppies handy, but seeing how Intel managed legacy support, I felt VIA should have as well.

Overclocking and the BIOS certainly needs some work. The lack of dividers and PCI/AGP locks will surely hamper more aggressive overclockers, though it was reported the VIA dividers are "silent", meaning they kick in at certain OCs. Eitherway, the inability to physically tweak them is something I had, and will continue to ding them for.

Other than the above complaints, I was fairly satisfied with the MSI K8T-Neo-FIS2R. The board is extremely stable, as typical with my past experiences with MSI, and very fast. The board itself isn't very expensive, selling at about . Add the Athlon 64 3200+ at , and the total package comes out to 538$. That's a lot of coint to drop, considering an AthlonXP/nForce 2 Ultra 400 combo is about half of that, and although the A64 platform is significantly faster, I'm certain many of you can reach those numbers with the cheaper combo in a 32-bit environement. When Windows XP 64-bit is released though (or a 64-bit version of Linux), all bets are off.

Pros: Excellent stability, great performance, feature rich.

Cons: BIOS and overclocking issues (no PCI/AGP locks). VIA controller requires a driver disk during Windows installation.

Bottom Line: Should you run out and pick up an A64 setup now if you already got a Barton and nForce 2? If you got the money, and must have a 64-bit solution now, then I say yes. Otherwise, I would wait until the platform matures a little more, as the A64 doesn't totally embarass the Athlon XP just yet.