Components (cont’d)

The Motherboard

MSI K8N Neo4 SLI - $123 Newegg: After the graphics card and CPU, the motherboard is the third most important component in your system. When picking out a motherboard, arguably the most important factors to consider are stability (first and foremost), features, and price. Stability is the most difficult to judge when window-shopping, which is why many enthusiasts are so brand-centric when it comes to motherboards. Quite simply, many have been burned by a bad purchase, and have sworn off one brand or another as a result, even if it may not have been the motherboard’s fault. You’d be surprised just how many “motherboard problems” are misdiagnosed and are actually the fault of user error.

For example back in the days just before the Athlon XP debuted, many Socket A motherboards shipped with hardware monitors that would shut down your system if the motherboard didn’t get a reading from the CPU fan. In theory, this was designed to protect the CPU from getting damaged in case the CPU fan failed. What would happen in the real world though is that end users would hook their CPU fan up to the system fan header instead of the CPU fan header by accident, after all the two headers were located right next to each other on many motherboards! As a result, the board would boot up for a second, and then turn itself off.

Any end user diagnosing the problem that wasn’t aware of the change would assume the board was having power problems and RMA it, even though the board was good. This is part of the reason why so many motherboards ship with power LEDs and diagnostic LEDs today.



Before you determine which motherboard to buy however, you first have to select a chipset. Here the choice is a no-brainer: nForce4! NVIDIA’s nForce4 line is the most feature-packed, and strongest-performing. The nForce4 chipset is also the most reliable. As a result, the only real debate on the chipset side isn’t picking the manufacturer, it’s determining which nForce4 chipset to get. NVIDIA offers the vanilla nForce4, nForce4 Ultra, nForce4 SLI, and more recently, the nForce4 SLI X16.

For our purposes, we chose the nForce4 SLI chipset. With its extra PCI-E graphics slot, nForce4 SLI provides an additional upgrade path for enthusiasts – if you’re unhappy with your system’s current performance, just drop in another graphics card! With nForce4 or nForce4 Ultra you don’t have this flexibility. And thanks to rapidly falling board prices, nForce4 SLI boards can be found for only $20-$40 more than the equivalent nForce4 Ultra board. Once nForce4 SLI X16 boards hit the market en masse, that price premium will likely fall even further.

The motherboard I selected for the rig was MSI’s K8N Neo4 SLI. The K8N Neo4 SLI’s bigger brother, the Neo4 Platinum has won its fair share of hardware around here, earning our Bull’s Eye Award in our motherboard roundup earlier this year. In addition to the regular nForce4 SLI features (of which there are many) the K8N Neo4 features Sound Blaster Live! 7.1 audio onboard, making it one of the higher-end SLI motherboards in the inexpensive price range.

With this in mind, it’s important to note that there are two categories of SLI motherboards on the market, one higher-end and one lower-end. The lower-end boards are based on the same design as the higher-end boards, only they lack a feature or two. In MSI’s case, the K8N Neo4 SLI ships with all the same features found in the K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI except for the additional Serial ATA storage controller (which supports two additional SATA devices) and the second Gigabit Ethernet controller, only it sells for about $40-$50 less. Therefore, if you don’t think you’ll need either of these features, save your money and get the regular K8N Neo4 SLI board.