MSI RD480 Neo2

Rounding things up:

The board is somewhat light on features, but its also light on price too. As such, the board does what it needs to do without any extra fuss. Not everyone needs a plethora of connections, including dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and more than four SATA ports - we feel that MSI has created a well-balanced motherboard that caters adequately for the targeted audience.

Having said that, the motherboard has the soldering points for the extra SATA ports and an extra Ethernet port. We get the impression that MSI will use the same PCB layout on the Platinum Edition of this motherboard, should they choose to release one. That is beside the point though, the motherboard does have plenty of features that will whet the appetite of the enthusiast looking for a good bargain.

The board's layout is well thought-out with very little to worry about around the CPU socket. We would like to see the same space around the second video card slot too, but that's a minor quibble that's not likely to be fixed on any motherboard. If you're looking to run SLI or CrossFire, you have to accept that your video subsystem is going to take up a considerable amount of space.

ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 has the distinct advantage of supporting Intel's Azalia High Definition Audio specification. NVIDIA's current chipsets don't support anything better than the rather substandard AC'97 codec. There are very few nForce4-based boards with a better audio codec too, which makes the Radeon Xpress 200 option more compelling.

The ULi South Bridge is considered to be a better alternative than ATI's SB450 with I/O performance inline with competing solutions. However, it's a shame that ULi's South Bridge is not natively supported by Windows XP, meaning that you'll have to resort to getting the drivers off a floppy disk in order to get the operating system to recognise your SATA hard drive. Those of you who have abandoned your floppy drive at the turn of the century will have to liberate one to get the board up and running.

The fact that ULi has recently been acquired by NVIDIA shouldn't be a cause for concern for the RD480 Neo2, as NVIDIA has said they will honour all current contracts with the ULi chipsets. The ULi South Bridges are in short supply already, but we don't expect the NVIDIA acquisition to halt this boards' availability. This is why some motherboard makers have opted for the substandard SB450 - at least it's not in short supply and manufacturers are capable of selling their board designs in volume.

The CrossFire switch card is very easy to lose and we actually misplaced it for a short while. It may be easier to use than the switch card on the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI motherboards; but because you're totally removing it from the motherboard when it's not in use, you're even more likely to lose it.

Value & Availability:

At the time of writing, availability is few and far between. We found the board listed at two places in the UK: both Misco and Savastore are selling the board for just over £76 including VAT. Alternatively, you can collect the ASUS A8R-MVP from HardwareArea for just under £80. However, there is no stock there either. In fact, we've not found anywhere with decent stock of the budget CrossFire motherboards. We've only found the problematic DFI LANParty UT RDX200 CF-DR and the high end version of the Sapphire PURE CrossFire board in stock and available in the UK at the time of publication.

Final Thoughts...

The MSI RD480 Neo2 is a very good no fuss motherboard with no fundamental problems. The biggest problem is the requirement for SATA drivers when installing Windows XP. In general, it does what it needs to do and does what you want it to do, too. It comes with solid performance, reliability and a reasonable feature set at an attractive price point.

We will be looking at CrossFire again later this month as, thus far, we've only had our hands on a Radeon X850 CrossFire Edition card and it's hard to recommend buying Radeon X850 CrossFire due to a number of shortcomings. However, since the introduction of Radeon X1000-series CrossFire, there have been a number of improvements made to make it a much more viable option. Driver support is still immature, but like SLI, it will take a little bit of time to get going in 5th gear. Given the way ATI's Catalyst driver team works, we don't have the slightest bit of doubt that the driver support will be there - it already is, in fact.

Availability is our final worry, and after spending a good couple of hours looking for CrossFire boards in the UK, we were disappointed to see how few are available at the moment. It's a solid board, but we can't make a recommendation without solid evidence that stock is going to arrive in a timely manner.