Overclocking
With the stock performance we've seen today, we almost forgot about overclocking it. Armed with a huge Cooler Master Hyper 48 heatsink, we lowered the multiplier of our P4 560 ES to 14x and started bumping up the FSB. While we had varying levels of success in the mid-220s, system stability was only achieved at 220FSB.
Swapping the air cooling for water cooling was met with more success as we finished with a 243FSB stable overclock. The vCore needed to be bumped up to 1.5v though, but the PolarFLO TT was a real help here.
One thing to point out was the board's watch dog feature was a real time saver. Whenever we configured a failed overclock, the system would reboot and default back to 200FSB, allowing us to redo the overclocking without digging into the case and resetting the CMOS jumper. We should point out that the watch dog auto rebooted only 75% of the time, as on occasion, we needed to cold reboot manually to revert back to safe settings.
Final Words
While Intel chooses to market the 915P as a mainstream part, based on our results today we can see MSI's 915P Neo2 Platinum is anything but ordinary. Out of the box, we had zero issues with the board (always an important thing), and once we got everything up and running, the board proved itself to be quite the speed demon.
BIOS options leave little to be desired, as every performance option we needed was readily accessible. The voltage options were especially impressive, as MSI was pretty generous with the voltage ceilings. While the FSB can go as high as 500MHz, I wouldn't get too excited as there's no way any current Pentium 4 can reach that speed. The memory clock options are very good, and at 700MHz, that's 25MHz higher than the fastest DDR-II modules available.
Put together with a P4 560, Corsair XMS25400, and ATI X800 XT, the 915P Neo2 Platinum tore through our tests, winning most of the benchmarks against the very quick ASUS P5AD2. We mentioned in our forums that MSI's marketing material posted results in favour of it's board against the P5AD2, and we were pretty skeptical about their claims. After two weeks of testing, we're at a loss how MSI squeezed so much performance out of the 915P chipset.
Outside of the performance, the 915P Neo2 is very feature rich. You have one x16 PCI Express slot, a couple x1 PCIe slots and three PCI slots ready for expansion. Add Gigabit Ethernet, HD audio and a couple RAID controllers, your extra PCI slots will probably end up collecting dust. Everything is intelligently laid out, and there are no complaints from us about component placement.
The only problem we had, which we have not covered in this review, is the Core Center software. The included software would not allow any FSB adjustments past 213FSB. Anything higher would consistently lockup Windows, forcing a reinstall the 3rd time it happened. The latest build we downloaded off their site would lock up the system about 2 minutes after Windows loaded... even at stock speed. It is possible there may have been a conflict with something else in the OS, but considering we run a clean installation for testing, we're totally stumped what may be the root cause of the issue.
While the Core Center software limited our overclocking, manually overclocking from the BIOS fared much better. That being said, we did not attain "super" overclocks using air cooling, but fell within the range of past 915/925 boards we've reviewed. Water cooling is almost what we would consider a requirement if you're planning any overclocking with the Pentium 4 Prescott. Luckily, the 915P Neo2 features watch dog overclocking monitoring and was a real time saver in our tests. In terms of stability, the board ran as solid as a rock (except when Core Center was installed), surviving two sweltering LAN parties during the test period.
Despite packing in enthusiast level features and performance, the board is priced for the mainstream, selling as low as . That's almost $100 cheaper than the ASUS board we compared it with, and given our results, the choice is a no brainer. It may sound like we're heaping on the praise to the product like a kid does with peanut butter on chocolate (hey, that was big in my day), but simply put, this praise is well warranted and the MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum should certainly be on your short list.
Pros: Great performance, decent overclocker, watch dog guardian, very stable and trouble free. Feature rich.
Cons: Core Center software is problematic.
Bottom Line: MSI has put together a package that enthusiasts must take note of. The 915P Neo2 Platinum is simply a speed demon that doesn't skimp on features, and well deserving of our highest honour.
If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
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