nVidia has made a name for itself amongst the enthusiastic community with both motherboards and graphics cards. Their nForce chipset is pretty much THE choice for an AMD enthusiast and with its latest model, the nForce4, nVidia brings about some very interesting technologies to their chipset like PCI Express and SATA2. MSI has always been very quick in adopting nVidia technologies and today, we take a look at their nForce4 board modeled K8N Neo4.

Packaging

Apparently, the packaging for the nF4 Ultra was not ready when MSI sent us this board so we cant say anything for sure, but judging from previous MSI nForce motherboards, we would say that you should get a reasonable bundle with rounded IDE cables and plenty of SATA cables plus all the goodies you normally expect.

Layout

We like the layout on the K8N Neo4- MSI does well to place everything where is should be. The first thing we noticed were the size of MOSFETS used on this board. The picture below shows you how big they are and if MSI has used them to provide good stability and better overclocking, then they surely work great. The CPU socket is also mostly free of capacitors allowing you to install a reasonably sized heatsink.

MSI places the x1 PCI Express slots between the x16 PCI Express slot and the CPU which is a good thing as this leaves good room between the CPU and VGA card both of which are very good at producing heat. There are four more standard PCI slots which should be good for all your expansion cards. The main power connector is placed towards the top right edge while the additional four pin connector is also placed towards the top-edge and we like both their positions as it avoids cable clutter.

The IDE and floppy connectors are placed below the memory modules- just where they should be, while the nVidia SATA connectors are towards the right edge of the board. Four more SATA connectors are placed close to the USB headers towards the bottom edge of the board. The firewire header is located to the left of PCI slots also making it easy to connect your back plate to. Lastly, the clearing CMOS jumper is located near the nVidia SATA connectors- we would’ve preferred this jumper to be a little more closer to the bottom edge as once you connect four SATA drives, the jumper might be a bit hard to get to.