Bundle and presentation
To give it its full title, MSI's K8N Neo Platinum Edition (riding on ATI's X800 PE wave, perhaps?) arrives in a shiny and well-presented box. All the salient features are shown on the back. The box is thick enough to suggest that a considerable bundle accompanies the cool-looking board.
Appearances can be deceiving. The above shot shows just what MSI ships with the K8N Neo. It looks like a work in progress, judging from the driver / utility CD-R. The CD-R contains the usual drivers, MSI's Live Update 3 (online BIOS and driver updates), DX9.0b, Trend PC-Cillin 2002, Xteq Systems X-Setup (comprehensive system reporting tool), and a gaggle of other MSI-branded utilities.
The manual is pretty good, however, and spends time explaining the ins and outs of NVIDIA's nForce3 250Gb Firewall and RAID features. MSI adds in rounded IDE and floppy cables, a couple of distasteful orange SATA leads, a custom I/O shield and a single bracket, which is dubbed D-Bracket2.
Rather than have an LED display on the motherboard itself, MSI chooses to incorporate 4 lights on the bracket itself. They flash in a certain order when the motherboard goes through te POST sequence. If POST fails for some reason, the LEDs' status can be cross-checked against the manual. The only problem is the bracket will be housed at the rear of any case, thereby making it difficult to see exactly which LEDs are on.
Another bracket with 2 FireWire ports should really have been added to the bundle, that or a front-mounted 3.5" or 5.25" box with audio and high-speed connectivity ports. MSI's specifications reckon that it is, so we put this down to a packaging error.
