MSI P35 Neo Combo Motherboard Review

Conclusions

This motherboard isn’t available on the market yet, but we think that its “correct” price should be USD 120, in order to compete with mainstream motherboards based on the nForce 650i chipset. MSI P35 Neo Combo has two advantages over motherboards based on this chipset from NVIDIA, first it provides a better performance, and secondly it supports DDR3 memories. On the other hand, nForce 650i-based motherboards support SLI.

Unfortunately P35-based motherboards that are arriving at the market today are still too expensive, above USD 175. We sincerely hope that the price of these motherboards drop soon – what should happen as soon as there are simpler products based on P35 available.

MSI P35 Neo Combo has everything to please the average user, with 12 USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire ports, a good overclocking capability and a decent on-board audio quality. The only thing we missed on this motherboard was on-board SPDIF connectors.

However, its support for DDR3 memories is, in fact, a limiting factor, because you can only have two memory modules from either DDR2 or DDR3 technologies on this motherboard, thus limiting your expansion capability – for instance for installing more memory you need to replace your old modules, instead of simply adding more modules as it would happen on mainstream motherboards featuring four DDR2 modules.

Also, DDR3 is more expensive than DDR2 and we think it will continue to be for at least one year.

We don’t think DDR3 will bring a higher performance gain over DDR2 and also P35 unofficially supports DDR2-1066, so if you are thinking of buying this motherboard to have DDR3-1066 you can buy any DDR2-based P35 motherboard and install DDR2-1066 modules, which are cheaper than DDR3-1066 ones.

We must remind, however, that the model we reviewed had a bug that prevented us to run our DDR2-1066 memories at 1,066 MHz and a week after we posted this review MSI said they had a new BIOS that fixed this issue.

DDR3 will probably make more sense with the next Intel chipset, X38, which will support DDR3 up to 1,333 MHz.

Given these facts if you are interested on the new Intel P35 chipset we recommend you to buy a motherboard solely based on DDR2 memories, as they provide a more flexible memory upgrade capability. Also, even though nForce 650i-based motherboards provides a lower performance on some applications, we recommend them if you are thinking of having SLI or even just two video cards in order to have up to four monitors installed.

MSI P35 Neo Combo is a good motherboard, don’t get us wrong. But we think that for the market it is targeted – average users – P35 motherboards using only DDR2 memories make much more sense.