Well, it appears I was right, there IS something fishy about the MSI Neo Plat 250GB!

[Richdog]

Those of you who have been following my ranting of late may have heard me babbling about my MSI Neo Platinum. I've been complaining of low bandwidth, and all-round general lack-lustre performance from my 3400+ accross the board. This is after experimenting with numerous driver sets, THREE different types of RAM, and every BIOS under the sun.

Well, today things took a very interesting turn. Out of sheer frustration and curiousity I decided once and for all that I would try and discover the root of the problem, and see if it was in fact the actual motherboard itself that was the problem.

With this in mind, I bit the bullet and re-installed my old Gigabyte K8N NF3 150 and of course reformatted Windows while I was at it ( :cry ). After the install, I loaded my essential progs and benchmarks and got to work. After setting an OC of 11*220 (lower than what I was running before)I loaded up SANDRA as my main port of call. Instantly the results left me stunned. They showed a dramatic increase in CPU and memory performance, and confirmed what my suspicions had been all along.

This is what my CPU scores had been at 11x230 on the MSI...



And these are the results from running a LOWER FSB and overall Mhz of 11x220 on the Gigabyte...



However I needed further proof, so I then loaded 3DMARK2001 and let her rip. BOOM. Straight to 24k+, where before I had only struggled to 23k on my MSI, RUNNING A HIGHER FSB AND OVERALL MHZ!

Here is what I was getting on my MSI, 2.45Ghz 11x223, 412/1100



And here is what I got with all-round LOWER clockspeeds on the Gigabyte, 11x220 on the CPU and 399/1100 on the GPU...



Moving onto 3DMARK2003 to see if there was any noticeable differences...

On the MSI, 2.45Ghz 11x223, 410/1100...



And on the Gigabyte, 2.4Ghz 11x220, 399/1100



As are clear from these benchmarks, the lower clockspeeds and FSB of the Gigabyte are winning the day. Bear in mind the Gigabyte is based on the older and slower NF3 150 chipset, with it's 600Mhz HTT speed and 8-bit datastreams. Bear in mind also that the 6800GT is running at slower clocks on the Gigabyte, so these 3DMARK results are even more important.

I can only imagine how my results will improve once I get a new NF3 250GB board, that performs as it should, bandwidth and all, at an FSB of 250Mhz+. As you can imagine, the performance leaps from this will be substantial accross the board.

It is also worth mentioning that I did try every possible option, BIOS, and driver set on the MSI Neo Platinum before it came to this. No matter what I tried the results remained consistent around the board. I can only conclude that as well as having numerous horrible issues and quirks, the MSI Neo Platinum performs sub-par compared to other, even older boards. I am going to post these findings on the MSI Forums, but from my experiences there it is a place where people are not willing to listen to criticism, and as a whole they even disapprove of overclocking, so i'm not sure whether they'll take any of it on board.

Did I have a defective board? Hmm possibly, although not with any type of defect i've ever experienced. Make of these results what you will, i'm just happy that my mind is finally settled now I know what the problem is and that it was nothing to do with me. :smile:

[menthel]

Perhaps its just waiting for a bios update?

[Richdog]

There have been many BIOS uppates already, and they do not improve overclockability or fix the main issues. Also, I dont think it would fix problems with lost memory bandwidth.

[menthel]

Then burn it!

[myth]

I dont see much of a differance...

[Richdog]

lol well if you see that the results on the MSI are 50Mhz higher on clockspeed, and 10mhz higher on GPU core speed than on the Gigabyte, then it is a noticeable difference, especially in 3DMARK2003. Also the gigabyte is an Nf3 150 board and not a 250GB... slower chipset all-round... And the SANDRA mem results are 200mb/s lower than the Gigabyte too, a BIG difference and loss in performance in rwlative terms. But to be honest, you'd have to be here using the machine to know what I mean. And as someone who has shelled out a lot of money for this rig, settling for any loss in performance where I should have none is simply not acceptable.

[myth]

Sooo close! LOL!!

[Richdog]

Ehhh right okayyeeee... lol. Well people who are actually using the board seem to know what i'm talking about... http://forum.msi.com.tw/thread.php?threadid=55763

[myth]

Ehhh right okayyeeee... lol. Well people who are actually using the board seem to know what i'm talking about... http://forum.msi.com.tw/thread.php?threadid=55763

That sucks! Heck, I got a higher score on my P4! he he he he he... And it only cost me $400 dollars! How much did that proc + mobo cost you?

[Richdog]

God, I spent about £340 on proc and mobo, and about £220 on RAM. Hehehe not exactly providing great value for money at the mo.

But it's just the damn FSB... as soon as I get a board with a volt-mod that will let me run 250Mhz FSB+ i'll be sorted. Could do with a 6800GT that OC'd a bit higher too, hehehe. Are overclockers EVER happy?

[myth]

OMG.... thats like 800 US! holy shiznick! Wow! you realy need a GOOD mobo!!!
What socket is that? Oh, and my proc hit thermal limits today! 75C..

[BUFF]

I'm sure that you have noticed that neither ABIT or DFI who are both currently nForce2 overclocking favourites have an nForce 3 250 board available yet.
ABIT in particular have said that the chipset has a few instability & RAID problems.

[Richdog]

Aye thats true, although DFI are about to release an Ultra-D Skt 939 mobo and an Infinity Skt 744 mobo. I'm just hoping this time round they get it right. We don't want another DFI Ultra-B all over again do we? Good thing about DFI though is the Vdimm should be higher, 2.1 or 3.2 most likely.

[Stoo]

Ahhh, looks like it really is a complete turkey of a board then..

Have a mooch through the hexus reviews for a replacement, they've done quite a few

[BUFF]

Aye thats true, although DFI are about to release an Ultra-D Skt 939 mobo and an Infinity Skt 744 mobo.

End of August at the earliest is what I've heard for the DFI LANparty 939.

[Richdog]

Sheeeyit youre kidding me mate, that's ridiculous. What the heck am I supposed to do until then? The current crop of boards aren't too great, either have low Vcore and decent Vdimm or vice-versa. *sigh* I need something soon too.