Today, I have chosen a special subject to write about - my own motherboard. Why do I call it special? Well, it took some time until I got completely happy with it, but it was worth the wait. I will tell you about this, and why would you use the MSI K9N Neo V3, also known as MSI NEO-F V3, to build a computer, while giving you the technical specifications and features at the same time, so get ready!


Let's start with my story... I had to choose between an ASUS motherboard, and the MSI NEO-F V3, and despite my previous (all positive) experiences with MSI products, I was thinking about buying the M2N-E instead of the NEO-F V3. There was also a Gigabyte board to think about, but in the end I decided to go with the NEO-F V3.

Basically, this is a budget board, but you get a lot of things for your money, especially the 3 years warranty and the all-solid capacitor build, which promises to deliver a very long life to your computer (obviously, you may end up seeing a system based on this board in a museum around 2020, since my old MSI motherboard has some inflated capacitors on it and has been running 24/24 for almost 2 years this way - and it's not dead yet!).

Due to the chipset limitations, you won't be able to run Windows 98/ME on a computer using this montherboard, but I don't think this should be a problem. After buying it, I noticed that a lot of options were not in the BIOS. "OK, this is a new board, so we'll update the BIOS," I said, but I ended up with more options, and a little disaster - memory performance went down the drain. Fortunately, the version 2.5 of MSI NEO-F V3's BIOS solved that issue, and now this baby runs fast as a shark, but I'll get to that part a bit later.

My suggestion is to use this board for a low-end gaming system, since it has decent overclocking capabilities, but there are already a lot of great new ones available, and processors with a TDP over 89W are not supported.


As you can see in the image above, the PCI Express x16 slot is placed below those two PCI Express x1 slots(which you won't use for sure), and a video card with a larger cooling system won't allow you to use properly any of the 3 PCI slots, without any overheating risks. Even more, a video card that's a bit longer may be a problem when you are going to use the SATA ports, but let's get to the good parts, shall we?

If a big video card may lead you into dropping the idea of using any PCI card, it's good to know that the onboard network adapter and the HD sound, both from Realtek, do their job wonderfully. As a side note, the network and sound parts on the mainboard are the only ones not using solid capacitors, but that shouldn't be such a big deal.

Now, let me tell you a few words about performance and overclocking. Last month, when I built a computer using a budget ASUS board, I was shocked to see that I wasn't able to set memory timings manually, so I ended up with a system running 4-4-4-12 DDR2 memory at some default (and really lame) timings. Congratulations, ASUS, you (don't) rock!

Speaking for myself, I managed to easily push my AMD X2 4000+ processor from 2.1GHz to 2.4GHz by increasing the FSB to 230MHz on default voltage, but I heard about people achieving stable 250MHz FSB on this board. Anyway, I am not crazy about reaching the limits, I simply overclocked enough to have my memory run at 800MHz. Regarding the memory, I have to tell you that the maximum voltage that can be set in the BIOS is 2.3V, and this could help some people achieve tight timings or pretty high frequencies.

Getting back to the features, I should also mention that RAID is supported, but Firewire is missing. These being said, I guess it has come the time to draw the conclusions...

...so here we go: the MSI NEO-F V3 is a great budget board, with good overclocking capabilities, uses solid capacitors, and performance is very good, no matter if you want to overclock or not. On the negative side, I must quote the uninspired board layout, and the lack of Firewire connectors, because I can't think about anything else bad, at this time.

At last, if you were wondering...this board is Vista certified, but I must give you one last advice - be sure to get the latest drivers from the official page, and don't use the included software overclocking utility. If you have any problems, I'll be sure to help you, and if I can't help you, there's always the official MSI user forum.

Since currently this great board can be found for as little as $78, I think the MSI K9N Neo-F V3 still has some time left until becoming obsolete, although you won't build any record breaker using it. After all, we're not all trying to run Crysis at 1080p resolution, or get insane scores in 3D Mark...

Later edit:

Detect networking problems earlier with network assessment services which can diagnose for potential issues.

If I could do something to make a full day last at least 48 hours instead of 24, buying a gaming console would be the first thing to do afterwards. Unfortunately, I can't make the planet spin slower, so I will stick to my computer for a while, together with Snake Kenzia, when I have a meeting and I get to early or other similar situations (thank you, Nokia!). Anyway, I find it rather interesting to see that Nintendo Wii is headed to domination, despite the strong opposition it has from Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation, and this is exactly what we're going to talk about next...


Despite the evolution of gaming related sales this spring, recent figures from NPD show that, while sales of Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3/2 as well as handheld Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable dropped in April, Nintendo Wii sales are very strong, almost as half as they were during the last Holiday season!

Anita Frazier, an analyst from NPD, said "The industry continues to set a blistering sales pace, and now shows a year-to-date increase of 31% over last year’s record-setting revenues. This is the first month in many that we’ve seen a decrease in portable hardware and software sales, but it’s important to remember that this year, the Easter holiday fell in March as compared to April in 2007. April 2007 and March 2008 saw sizable games in portable in part due to the holiday timing."

Regarding those figures I mentioned above, it's enough to say that Nintendo Wii, with almost 715,000 units sold in April, managed to surpass the sales Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 2 and Sony PlayStation 3 got together. Do I have to say more?

Well, Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, seems to disagree with the above. He said "This is only the third year of our [X360] existence and only the second year of Sony [PS3] and Nintendo’s [Wii] existence. Are we just amusing ourselves by trying to declare a winner and loser while the customers are still out there deciding? […] I think it’s way too early… When somebody’s well on their way to reaching 100 million units [that would be the time]."

For me, the Wii is a winner in 2008. What's your opinion?

The ATI Catalyst 8.5 driver package is here, so I'll skip the introduction, jumping right to the part I am sure everyone is interested in - the performance improvements brought by this new version:


- Call of Juarez DX10: Performance increases up to 12% on systems containing an ATI Radeon HD 3xx0 series of products
- Halo: Performance increases by 10-30% across all of the supported ATI Radeon series of products
- Lost Planet DX10: Performance increases from 5 to 35% on systems containing an ATI Radeon HD 3xx0 series of products
- Stalker DX9: Performance increases by 20-50% when HDR is enabled in the game; across all ATI Radeon HD38x0 series of products
- World in Conflict DX10: Performance increases up to 25% on systems containing an ATI Radeon HD36x0 and/or an ATI Radeon 38x0 series of product. Higher performance gains are noticed on systems containing an ATI Radeon 3870x2 series of products.

Basically, all cards since Radeon 9500 are supported, but most improvements are targeting the last generations, of course. Here's more...

- Catalyst Control Center Component Video - This release of Catalyst introduces 480i and 480p support. These formats will be found in the predefied component video format list found in the Catalyst Control Center->Component Video->Advanced page.
- ATI Graphics Driver Uninstall Enhancement - This release of Catalyst introduces an update to the ATI uninstall utility.
- SECAM TV Out Support - This release of Catalyst introduces support within the graphics driver to enable TV output adhering to the SECAM standard.
- 1080p HDTV custom mode - This release of Catalyst 1080p HDTV display mode. This feature will be available for display devices that use an HDMI connector and is available under the Windows XP and Vista operating systems.
- Adaptive AA on OpenGL for Catalyst Control Center - This release of Catalyst introduces Adaptive AA for Orca Driver, geometry for alpha tested objects are now submitted multiple times to the hardware using the multi-sample mask feature to update one sample at a time in the frame buffer using centroid sampling. With each pass of the sampling position for textures is shifted to be at the location of the sample that is being updated in that pass.

...and it doesn't stop here, but I don't want to become boring, so just go to the official ATI drivers page, select your OS and card, then click on "Go." Good luck!

Intel’ Core 2 Duo generation rapidly nears its end, but we can’t deny that this one, as with the previous Core Duo generation, really restored Intel’s hegemony on the CPU market. It’s clear that AMD has cheaper solutions as far as quad-cores are concerned, but Intel is trying to keep the balance by slashing prices once in a while. But according to some market studies, quad-cores have not yet been widely embraced, as the majority of PC users still rely on dual-cores. Speculating this aspect, Intel now announces that one of last models in the Core 2 Duo series is going to be a cheap but fast dual-core.

Known as Core 2 Duo E8600, this CPU will end up the fastest dual-core with its out-of-the-box 3.33GHz clock and 6MB cache. It will be available in Q3 for only $266 price, but that is the announced wholesale price.

Intel surely reached the cap with the 3.33GHz clock and since these are the last months of the Core 2 Duo generation, it’s fair to say that we won’t see any higher clocks until the advent of the new generation. However, we can still overclock these babies and a higher standard clock automatically means that the overclocking potential is increased, and breaking the 4GHz barrier now becomes a walk in the park.

Maybe Intel could push the clocks some more with the next-gen, but the truth is it really isn’t necessary as Phenom with its current clock speeds still lags behind.

Less than a month ago, we were talking about Qimonda and its jump from GDDR3 to GDDR5, and now it seems those memory chips have found their place. Where? Obviously, in ATI's latest graphics cards! Today, it became official - AMD announced the first commercial implementation of GDDR5, but they won't work only with Qimonda, since Samsung and Hynix have also been mentioned.


Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Graphics Product Group, AMD, said "The days of monolithic mega-chips are gone. Being first to market with GDDR in our next-generation architecture, AMD is able to deliver incredible performance using more cost-effective GPUs. AMD believes that GDDR5 is the optimal way to drive performance gains while being mindful of power consumption. We’re excited about the potential GDDR5 brings to the table for innovative game development and even more exciting game play."

These being said, I hardly wait to see the first ATI cards using GDDR5, because that day is surely not that far. With NVIDIA's upcoming GPUs probably still missing the technology required to use GDDR5, ATI may finally grab the performance crown...or not, because this is something that remains to be seen.