MSI RD480 Neo2 Motherboard

Price: Rs 8,000 (3 yrs warranty)

Key Specs: ATi Cross Fire support, Gigabit LAN

Contact: Micro Star International, Delhi. Tel: 51758808. Email: info@msi-india.comRQS# E32 or SMS 130332 to 9811800601

This is another motherboard based on the RD480 chipset,

meant for budget conscious gamers. The motherboard supports the AMD Athlon

64/64FX/64X2 processors. This one also uses Ati's CrossFire technology, which

allows you to plug-in and use two ATi graphics cards on the same board. The

condition of course, is that both cards must also support CrossFire. Now, it is

advised that, as is the case with ECS RD 480-A939, only ATi graphics cards

should be used with this board to ensure proper compatibility. 

The board has an FSB of 1 GHz for higher data transfer

rate. It has four DIMMs that can take up to 4 GB DDR 400 RAM. In addition to the

two PCIe x16 slots for Cross Fire cards, it also has two slots each of PCI and

PCIe x1. The board also has four SATA ports, which support RAID 0, 1, 0+1. Plus,

it has 8 USB ports and a Gigabit LAN port. Another highlight is support for 7.1

channel audio. Optional FireWire support is also there. 

We tested the motherboard with Athlon 64 FX-55 processor, 1

GB DDR 400 RAM, 120GB SATA HDD and the ATi Radeon X1300 graphic card. SYSmark04,

3Dmark05 and Doom3 benchmarks were used to test the motherboard for regular

office productivity and Internet related applications, graphics, and gaming. The

motherboard scored 194, 2806 and 33.9 fps in these benchmarks respectively,

which is lower than the ECS RD480 in the same category.

Bottom Line: The performance of the board is lower

than the ECS RD480-A939 but it has better features such as Gigabit LAN. So, we

will recommend this board only if you are going for Cross Fire edition graphics

card such as X1600 or higher and want some extra features on your RD 480 board.

Anubhav Verma