The MSI P35 Neo is the only value oriented motherboard in this round up. Because of this, you won't see features like Crossfire support (no second x16 PCI-E slot). However, we were slightly surprised MSI chose to bundle the standard ICH9 southbridge - so, no RAID support whatsoever with this board. The board also only boasts 5 internal SATA ports without any eSATA ports at all (the fifth SATA ports is courtesy of the Marvell 88SE6111 chip. What's good to know is that because there's no RAID support, the motherboad does not suffer the RAID problem we saw with the P35 Diamond and P35 Platinum..
As a value motherboard, you won't see any extravagant cooling - the MSI P35 Neo simply make do with two very simple heatsinks to cool both the P35 Express chipset and ICH9 southbridge. Thankfully, MSI still is nice enough to use thermal paste even for a value oriented board. Though not pictured, the southbridge cooler also uses thermal paste.
During testing, the MSI P35 Neo ran flawlessly, even when overclocked to an FSB of 400 MHz (1600 MHz effective). The board does display the same behaviour as its high end sibling - the BIOS will automatically raise the FSB and MCH voltage when your raise the FSB. Just lke with the P35 Diamond and P35 Platinum, we selected a slightly lower value than what is set by the BIOS. Unlike the P35 Diamond and P35 Platinum, the P35 Neo does not offer any control over the FSB strap, so your overclocking headroom will be more limited, but unless you're planning to use very high FSBs in excess of 400 MHz, you really don't need strap control.
It's silghtly unnerving to see a value board does better in regards to applying correct SPD timings than premium boards, but that's what we're seeing here. Of course, one could argue the difference in timing doesn't really matter anyway in real life performance, but it just shows that MSI still have some home work to do with their P35 Diamond and P35 Platinum boards. After all, it's completely natural to get something more when you pay more.
Well, this is slightly over the top. In our opinion, the P35 Neo applied too high voltage for our E6300 processor, even when taking overclocking into account - 1.4 volts. That's about 0.15 volts higher than we generally use and saw with the other boards. Of course, you can always change the voltage manually from the BIOS, but again we expected better from MSI. Let's see what the board behave when put under heavy load for a certain period of time - clock wise.
Guess only the P35 Diamond is the only motherboard with considerable advantage in this area. The MSI P35 Neo still shows some ripples in clocks, though again as we said before, you probably won't notice them in real world situations.
Expansions and Add-Ons
Typically, you don't expect to get extra features with a value board
and this is also the case with P35 Neo. We already mentioned there's
five SATA ports you can use (four fron the ICH9 and one from the
Marvell chip). For expansions, there's two PCI slots, three 1x and one
x16 PCI-E slot. Of course, if you're using a dual slot cooling graphics
card, you'll likely lost one 1x PCI-E slot - two if you want to allow
more room for airflow. On the backpanel, you'll find four USB
ports, PS/2 ports, a serial and paralel port plus the standard six
analog ports. Nothing out of the ordinary really. We think MSI skimp
too much in terms of accesories with this board - you'll only get one
SATA cable and one 4 pin ATX to SATA power connector, plus an IDE
cable. Even without RAID, we still expect at least two SATA cables and
the appropriate SATA power connectors.We're not really crazy about the layout either. With such sparsely feature motherboard, we'd certainly expect a better layout than the P35 Neo offer. No doubt MSI could've positioned the first and second DIMM slots inline with the third and fourth slot - allowing you to remove memory modules without fiddling with the graphics card. That fifth SATA port placement can also complicate things if you have a long enough graphics card with dual slot cooling. Although we had to admit, it won't hinder installation and removal somce ot
so far out.
Tweaking and Overclocking Options
Though the MSI P35 Neo doesn't offer all the bells and
whistles like the P35 Diamond and P35 Platinum, MSI is still nice
enough to provide the most iimportant BIOS setting for
overclocking. Settings like
FSB, memory timings and voltage settings can be set automatically
or manually adjusted. Much like its higher end siblings, the MSI P35
Neo does
not offer any built in BIOS utility or BIOS profile support.We generally think MSI could have done better with this board Here are some things we think would've made the board so much better:
- RAID support by using the ICH9R instead of the standard ICH9. It would also add the possibility of adding two more SATA ports, for a total of 7 SATA ports.
- A much better layout - SATA and DIMM placement could've been better and with such a sparesly populated board, we certainly expect more than what we got with this board.
- A much more complete accesories won't hurt either. For around US$ 30 to 50 you can get the Gigabyte P35-DS3P which offer more flexible overclocking options, Crossfire support, 8 SATA ports - all RAID 0/1 capable and a more complete set of accesories.
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