Like the Gigabyte product, the MSI packaging can be opened up and contains useful information about the board.

Credit is due to the three-phase voltage controller, which is equipped with additional cooling elements. There is, therefore, still potential for overclocking.

MSI has not, however, skimped on accessories: four Serial-ATA cables and two voltage adapters, IDE round cable, luxury software package and slot panels for sound (digital and optical as well as 5.1 audio for analog systems) and FireWire are all included. The color-coding of the pins for the housing panel, which is ignored by most manufacturers, is praiseworthy. Who wants to have to find the terminal allocation by trial and error?

Controller chips on the MSI board.

Included in the MSI package.

It was also interesting to find that the GPU clock of the graphic card is automatically increased during operation - here, the 3D benchmarks show their effect. The original clock for an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is 324 MHz, whereas the card suddenly works on 330 MHz in combination with the MSI board. With the aid of the core cell center, CPU and Northbridge fans can be continuously adjusted independently of each other in Windows XP. In the performance test, the MSI 875P Neo finished in the top group. The total package costs approximately $190 - a good offer considering the wide range of features. All in all, it remains the fastest 875 board in the test.

Our assessment in brief: MSI offers a very cost-effective product with the 875P Neo. For just under $190, the customer acquires high performance and virtually a full set of features.