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Hi All,
Getting ready to upgrade for the New Year from a KT600 to nForce2 400 Ultra board. I have narrowed it down to these two boards. I am looking for opinions or experiences.
They seem pretty close in the flexibility available in the BIOS and they both have similar features I am interested in. I have found plenty of reviews for the Asus board but none for the MSI. Any opinions or experience you have had with either board would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
John
I know this isn't what you want to hear, but if you want to use an nForce2 board, in my opinion, the NF7-S is the best board. Great for overclocking and has decent onboard sound.
The features on both are very different - the MSI use the MCP RAID southbridge with SATA off the PCI bus & supporting NV RAID.
There are quite a few A7N8X variants (with different feature sets) so which is it you were considering?
If the De Luxe then SATA runs through the PCI bus from a Sil 3112 controller but it has SoundStorm onboard audio & Firewire (neither of which the MSI has).
The ABIT NF7-S V2.0 & AN7 really are 2 of the best socket A boards ever made.
Don't have any experience of the MSI board but I've had 4 rigs running here at one time with the A7N8X Dlx, love the board. I think the NF7S is better for overclocking bot the Asus is feature rich, can even go wi-fi with the -E version.
i have the MSI K7N2G-ILSR at the moment and it has all the overclocking options (multi/fsb/cpu volt/vdimm adjustments) and also has SATA raid.
but
i would personally recommend the NF7 / NF7-s as i think its a better board
Bonus of the Asus board is that the northbridge is passively cooled - there's little or nothing to choose between the a7n8x deluxe and the nf7-s otherwise though (more features on the asus deluxe and -e boards though) - the abit board is this forums preferred option - better overclocking headroom iirc.
i found with the a7n8x it was so fussy with wat settings it would post with, could of been my hardware though
the abit just seems slightly better imo get a nf7-s v2 :D