Price Guides August 2004: CPUs and Motherboards

If you're building a new system and are planning on taking on an A64 there's no reason to skimp on the motherboard. This week price drops allow us to finally recommend MSI's K8N Neo Platinum board again. MSI went all out with this board and included all the bells and whistles you would expect from them such as NVIDIA's NF3 250Gb chipset, integrated gigabit LAN, built-in hardware firewall, and 8-channel audio courtesy of Realtek's ALC850. Throw in the capacity to handle up to eight hard drives natively, four SATA (RAID 0, 1, 0+1 capable), four PATA, and you have a powerhouse of a motherboard.

As an added bonus, the K8N is also capable of some pretty impressive overclocking which is a rarity among its A64 motherboard brethren. As with our AMD 64 recommendation, it's worth keeping in mind that this is indeed a Socket 754 board which will, much like Socket 754 processors, be phased out in a relatively short time frame. One major saving grace is the very low cost of adoption for this platform and the fact that this board will allow you to get some good overclocking in before you need to send it to the pile of hardware otherwise used as doorstops and paperweights.

Back to the 32-bit world. AMD still has lots of options for Socket A motherboards thanks to the amount of time it has had to be on the market and mature. Abit's NF7-S Revision 2 still hangs on as an amazing overclocker when paired with a Barton chip. To add to its allure, the NF7-S is also dropping in price. This model is definitely a good choice if you still have a fairly recent Athlon XP and need only a new motherboard but don't yet want to invest in an A64.