865PE/875P Motherboard Roundup June 2003 - Part 1: 20-way Shootout

MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R

The Neo-FIS2R and the Neo2-FIS2R are nearly identical in terms of BIOS features and onboard features. Unlike our initial review of the MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R we are more negative about this motherboard now that we have been able to retest the Neo-FIS2R with new BIOSes.

The Neo-FIS2R comes with an onboard IDE RAID controller powered by Promise's PDC20378. The PDC20378 controls two of the four onboard Serial ATA connectors and the third IDE connector. Together with the Primary and Secondary IDE connectors, ICH5R Serial ATA connectors, and the PDC20378-controlled connectors the Neo-FIS2R is able to support a total of ten SATA/IDE drives. Unfortunately the PDC20378 does not support ATAPI drives, but you can always connect four optical drives to your Primary and Secondary IDE connectors, and your hard drive(s) to the Serial ATA connectors or third IDE connector.

As with the Neo2-FIS2R the Neo-FIS2R includes outstanding overclocking-friendly BIOS features. The most notable BIOS adjustments are a FSB value up to 500MHz in 1MHz increments, VDIMM up to 3.20V in 0.05V increments (except 3.15V), AGP/PCI adjustments up to 150MHz/75MHz (80MHz/40MHz is about as high as you should go though) and an incredibly high Vcore ceiling of 2.300V. The Neo-FIS2R does undervolt a bit, but that hardly matters considering you can adjust Vcore to your heart's content. One other unique feature of the Neo-FIS2R's BIOS is the addition of two memory divider options that allow 500MHz and 532MHz DDR operation when an 800MHz FSB processor is installed and running at its stock speed.

The most unique feature the Neo-FIS2R brings to the table is CoreCell. As we mentioned before, CoreCell is MSI's own proprietary technology whose purpose is to regulate your systems voltages and temperatures to better fit user's needs. While this is certainly a nice idea in practice, MSI still hasn't come up with a working utility to tweak CoreCell. There is a CoreCenter utility meant to tweak MSI's CoreCell technology, but our best efforts to get this program to function properly failed. MSI really needs to get their act together on CoreCell and release a fully functional program that is able to take advantage of the temperature and voltage regulation possibilities with CoreCell. Otherwise this novel technology will go completely unused.

Besides the broken CoreCenter utility, we had a couple negative things to say about MSI's LiveUpdate utility. Even though we were able to successfully update the Neo-FIS2R's BIOS via MSI's LiveUpdate program, it took several tries to get it to work. Windows froze at least three or four times before the LiveUpdate program was finally able to reprogram the Neo-FIS2R's BIOS to reflect BIOS revision 1.4 (5/19/2003). Almost exactly the same thing happened with the Neo2-FIS2R. Another issue that we've heard users are having is frying boards after they have updated their BIOS. We have heard reliable reports of users killing their Neo-FIS2R motherboards after updating to BIOS 1.3 and BIOS 1.4. Unfortunately we were able to replicate this problem when we completely killed our Neo-FIS2R after finally being able to update to BIOS 1.4. This is a huge problem, and we suggest that you do not purchase this motherboard until these issues are resolved.

UPDATE 6/19/2003:

After closely consulting with MSI over a period of several days it appears that MSI has remedied a great deal of the issues we experienced with the 875P Neo-FIS2R through a recently released BIOS, revision 1.5. The CoreCenter utility, meant to tweak MSI's CoreCell technology, is now fully operational. We were able to adjust CPU and North Bridge fan speeds, Vcore and VDIMM voltages, and of course the FSB as well. Utilities such as CPU-Z (and Windows Properties too) did not properly register the changes in FSB with CoreCenter, so we were forced to use our own proprietary utility. 3DMark03 is able to properly register CoreCenter’s FSB adjustments, so we suggest users use that benchmark for this purpose. The latest version of CoreCenter (1.0.5.3) is available here.

MSI’s LiveUpdate utility, primarily used for updating MSI BIOSes, has also been fixed. We were successfully able to flash from BIOS 1.4 to BIOS 1.5 several times without any crashes or BIOS corruption issues whatsoever. You can download the latest version of LiveUpdate by visiting this link. In the end, all the issues we experienced with the MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R have finally been fixed. Hopefully, in the future, MSI will not have to work so feverishly with us on troubleshooting early BIOS issues with their motherboards, as enthusiasts will not stand for these types of problems.

We would like to thank MSI for the countless hours they put in helping AnandTech remedy the issues we experienced with their 875P Neo-FIS2R motherboard. We would not have been able to bring this vital information to our readers had it not been for MSI’s hard work.