MSI K9NU Neo-V (ULi/Nvidia M1697)
Board Revision: 1.0
Installed BIOS: 1.0 (05-19-2006)
Upgraded with: 1.7 (09-06-2007)
We decided to add another low-cost motherboard to our test lineup. This one is based on the M1697 chipset, which has its origins with ULi, which was bought by Nvidia a couple years ago. Feature-wise this product is nothing special, but it's certainly capable enough to run any Athlon 64 X2 or Sempron processor. We found it good to see that MSI cared for supporting this product, although it is positioned at the lower end of the market. There have been several BIOS updates over the last months; the last one is dated September 6, 2007. Obviously, this is too early to support Phenom and it doesn't come as a surprise that the quad cores didn't work with this platform.
MSI provides a CPU compatibility page, where you can check the compatibility of your motherboard with a certain CPU.