MSI P35 Neo-F Very Good Budget board

[Dyre Straits]

I've never owned an MSI motherboard until this one. But, I picked this up on the budget table a few months ago and have been very pleasantly surprised by how stable and nice it is to work with.

It's an Intel board supporting all the latest CPUs including Quad core CPUs now being released by Intel.

Overclocking has been very easily accomplished and the board will reset itself if it fails to POST after making changes.

I'm also quite pleased that MSI have provided constant updates for the BIOS and Drivers, too. Updating can be done via a Utility using LiveUpdate if one wants to do so. It can also be done manually which is mostly the preferred method. I've tried both and they have both performed without any problems.

I've done some tinkering this weekend to see how well it would perform with 4 GBs of RAM from two different manufacturers [A-Data and OCZ]. So far, the system [Vista Home Premium OEM 32-bit] has not crashed even the first time. Since installing SP1, all 4 GBs of RAM show up in the System information.

Presently, my E6700 is running nicely at 3.2 GHz and the RAM is set to 1.25 Ratio at 5-4-4-15/2T @ 800 MHz. (There's no setting to try to change to 1T that I can find.)

I've played FarCry for hours upon hours without any hiccups or problems at all. [Using the 1.4 patch with HDR enabled. ]

I'm posting this mainly to encourage you to not overlook some of the budget boards made by MSI. I've been really pleased with the purchase and will give them another try when I'm ready to do anymore upgrading.


CPU-Z screenshots below....

[IModAmd]

It's since september i have an MSI board and im very pleased with ... Overclocking was really easy i overclocked my 6000+ easily to 3.49 with air cooling.

[Chaos]

I use the MSI P35 Platinum myself

[IModIntel]

Originally Posted by IModAmd

It's since september i have an MSI board and im very pleased with ... Overclocking was really easy i overclocked my 6000+ easily to 3.49 with air cooling.

Yeah, you had to lower your HT to get there, you must get like a big 1.5568783645982675% of difference than if you leave it at 3.2 with full HT.

[Sylvan]

I have a budget Gigabyte mobo in the sig, although it wasn't really budget at the time I bought it, and I can use onboard GPU until I get another good GPU (sold the old one) and this mobo has been nothing short of dead on stable. On the building side for myself MSI has been mostly great with only a few so-so or bad mobos just like most of the top manufacturers like Gigabyte and Asus. On the Intel side I also built wth the MSI G33 mATX and used an E8400 and it was (and still is for the customer) a very good motherboard.