Product Reviews

MSI's K8N SLI Platinum motherboard is the cheapest board we've seen that uses nVidia's nForce 4 SLI chipset. It supports the entire range of AMD Socket 939 processors, including dual-core chips, and has two PCI-E x16 slots, which enables you to install two graphics cards. Typical for boards of this type, an SLI riser card has to be turned around to select normal or SLI mode.

We tested the board with an

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Athlon 64 3500+ and 1GB of DDR RAM installed in a dual-channel configuration. The Shopper application benchmark result of 109 was good, although we've seen faster results from other motherboards.

The nForce 4 chipset is well known for its wide range of features. MSI has implemented most of them, but there are some notable omissions that are found in higher-end boards.

In particular, the K8N SLI has only one network port and four SATA2 ports, which can support multiple hard disks in a RAID array. While this should be plenty for most people, we've seen boards with eight SATA2 ports. MSI has also failed to include any PCI-E x1 expansion slots, relying on PCI instead. This isn't a problem at the moment, but as more expansion cards move to the PCI-E standard, this motherboard will offer little scope for upgrades.

That said, it's very cheap for an SLI motherboard and an excellent choice for the budget-consciousness shopper who wants the option of using two graphics cards together.