MSI 915G Neo2 Motherboard 

This board is half the price of the 925XE based Neo Platinum edition board, which is also reviewed this time. And this has comparatively lesser features. It doesn't support SATA RAID, has a 800 MHz FSB as against the 1 GHz of the Platinum board. 

It doesn't have SafeBIOS for keeping a backup of your BIOS. It does, however, also support the Dynamic Overclocking Technology, which lets you modify the CPU clock ratio and get better performance. Plus, it comes with x16 PCI-Express slot for adding a graphics card, and onboard PCI-Express Gb LAN. The board comes with 7.1 channel high definition audio. Based on the Intel 915G Express Chipset, the board supports dual DDR2 memory, has eight USB 2.0 connections, four Serial ATA and three Parallel ATA connectors. We found this board's performance to be really good. The same specs were used for testing as the Neo Platinum board (above). It was marginally lower in Business and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone benchmarks, but exceeded in the Quake 3 Arena and 3Dmark 2003 benchmarks.

The Bottom Line: Overall, if you can compromise on some of the features, it's a great board to buy. Well worth the price.

Binesh Kutty