This is part of a series of reviews for hardware and software I have installed in my HTPC, or Home Theater Personal Computer. For those that don’t already know, an HTPC is a computer that is set up to run multimedia applications such as movie playing and TV tuning. My particular HTPC is connected through our main television with a DirecTV feed as well as a DVD/VCR combo. I use it for tuning the TV, recording movies and television shows and general computing. The hard drive has all of our DVD’s now burned to it, and we can watch them at the push of a button.

I knew that I wanted something fairly solid for the backbone of this system, the motherboard. I wanted something that would match up to the specifications I wanted to run in the system, yet with not a lot of frills. I didn’t need SATA, but keeping the option open wasn’t a bad idea. The board needed to support a 533MHz FSB Intel processor on a 478-pin connection, as I already owned the 2.4a Prescott processor. Since the processor was 533MHz and the RAM I owned was PC3200, it would need to be able run asynchronous RAM/CPU. The board needed an AGP slot, and no onboard video, as I was going to install an ATI All-In-Wonder card for video control. Other than that, I wanted a board that I could expand later without major investment, so some support of the next higher specifications would be desired, as well.

Background

The MSI PT880 NEO-LSR came up under my radar when I read a review on HardOCP.com for its big brother, the NEO-FISR. The LSR was available on Newegg while the FISR was not, and the specifications appeared to support what I wanted, plus a little.

Specifications of the PT880 NEO-LSR

Specifications:
Supported CPU : Intel processors with 400, 533 or 800MHz FSB.
Chipset: Via PT880 Northbridge, Via VT8237 Southbridge
RAM: 4 DIMM slots for Dual Channel DDR RAM, Up to 4GB of DDR400, 333, or 266MHz
IDE: 2x UltraDMA 33/66/100/133 connectors for up to 4 devices
SATA: 2 slots for SATA 150 drives. RAID support for RAID 0 or 1 array
Slots: 1 8X/4X AGP slot, 5 PCI slots with 32-bit support
Ports:LAN (10/100),8 USB 2.0 with four on rear (4 on front, or use supplied D Bracket),
Onboard Audio: Via 6 channel audio codec Realtek ALC655
Onboard LAN: 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet
Form Factor: ATX


Purchase

I found this board on my favorite website, Newegg.com. I did a quick search for the NEO-FISR and couldn’t find it, but the LSR did come up. I reviewed the specifications and found that it would indeed meet my needs for the HTPC, and it was quite a bit cheaper than the FISR at $70 in April. A search today shows that you can find this board for $50-60 depending on the vendor today, although it is not currently available on Newegg.

Out of the box

If you want to see what the board looks like, check out this link:

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/mb_image/MS-7008_large.jpg

The box contains the following:

Quick User Guide
Quick Guide, which is also a foldout poster-sized picture of the motherboard
Driver CD
Set of round FDD and HDD cables; nice touch!
SATA Power cable converter from 4-pin Molex to SATA
Two SATA connector cables
D-Bracket for additional 2 USB 2.0 connectors on back of CPU


The motherboard is protected in a static-free bag with foam sheets as well. There is a tray which separates the motherboard from the remainder of the items packed in the box, and a baggy of screws, stand offs, and cable routers is included.

Layout

This board is the second best layout I have found, second only to the ABIT IS7-E. The PCB itself is red and the connectors are color coded purple, yellow, orange, green and red. The bright colors make this a good choice for a box with a side-panel window and some cold cathode lights in it, although I have not taken advantage of this myself.

The only negative I can say about the layout of the board would be the placement of the CD-In connector. Like so many other boards out there today, they are placing this connector where it will not be reached with a typical wire, as the connector is in the extreme lower-left corner of the board (bottom-back of the box) while in most towers the CD/DVD player is found to the upper-right of the board, or the top-front of the box. Additionally, if the PCI slots are populated, it is even more difficult to make the connection.

The board has the HDD and FDD connectors right where they should be, front and center of the board. This makes it very easy to connect the board to the Floppy, Optical and Hard drives without utilizing very long IDE cables. The ABIT board had perpendicular connectors, which are slightly better in my opinion, but this board is laid out nicely.

The Northbridge chipset, the Via PT880, is cooled by a simple radiator. The Southbridge is no actively or passively cooled at all, instead using in-box airflow only. The SATA connectors are placed well, although I am not using any currently.

BIOS/Support Disk

The BIOS supplied with this board is the AMIBIOS Plug N Play, and it works pretty well overall. You can monitor the health of your PC, including the temperatures of the CPU, fan speeds, etc. You can adjust the FSB of the motherboard, or use dynamic Overclocking as well.

Dynamic Overclocking

This board has something new that I had never seen before. There is a function called Dynamic Overclocking, which allows the computer to ramp up the clock speed of the processor as applications call for it. There are six preset levels, ranging from Private to Commander. Obviously, the higher in rank you go, the more aggressive the overclocking becomes. I have used the Dynamic Overclocking, but chose instead to Overclock my own system as I wanted to. I like to control the system clocks, I have found…

The user can automatically modify the CPU, DDR and AGP voltage, and there is more than enough range to overclock the system as high as you want. The AGP frequency can be set manually as well, so that you don’t run out of overclock on the CPU due to too high of a frequency on the AGP/PCI slots.

The support disc includes the drivers necessary to run this board with any Windows OS after Windows 98. Also on the disc is few free software programs. The freebies include MSI’s own CoreCell Chip, Live Update, FuzzyLogic4, PC Alert and i-Speeder.

CoreCell Chip

CoreCell Chip is a handy program produced by MSI that allows the user to change frequencies of the CPU and RAM from a Windows environment. You can also monitor the temperatures available to the system such as CPU, System and Northbridge. You can also monitor the voltages on the separate rails, and set your own warning levels for temperature or level. There is an ‘auto’ button for the overclocking which will run the system up in clock frequency until the system freezes, then drop the frequency slightly for maximum overclock. I have tried to use this several times, but it never works.

Live Update

The Live Update is a program which regularly checks the MSI website for updated BIOS, drivers, and programs. In theory, if there are updates available, the program will download and then flash the BIOS or load the new program. Only problem? It never worked on my computer… I knew there was an update available for the BIOS, and I needed it for stability running the Prescott chip. The program would check for updates, and come back with “No new updates!” I manually downloaded the updates and loaded them, flashed the BIOS, and went along my merry way. I don’t think a live update program that doesn’t work is very useful…



So how do I like it?

The board has performed admirably for me in the service of an HTPC. I hooked it up with the following Hardware/Software:

Antec Overture case
MSI PT-880 NEO-LISR Motherboard
2.4a Prescott family Intel Pentium 4 chip
512MB (2X256MB) of PC3200 Corsair Value Ram
120GB Seagate 7200RPM Hard Drive w/2MB cache
160GB Seagate 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB cache
Cisco Aironet 350 Wireless 802.11b PCI card
ATI 9600 AIW video card with ATI Multimedia Center Software
Microsoft Windows XP Home edition
Cyberlink’s PowerCinema 3.0 software
ATI MultiMedia Center Software


The board didn’t seem very stable at first, and the free software supplied by MSI (Live Update and CoreCell Chip) didn’t work. The board would hang often when shifting to screen saver mode, and it would never come out of hibernate correctly. I fiddled around in the BIOS settings with Wake settings, but nothing worked. Finally, I uninstalled all of the MSI software, and now I have no problems. It didn’t work anyway, and appeared to be causing conflicts which resulted in system stability issues. Why leave it on?

Since I uninstalled the applications, I have been very happy with the performance of this board. I do get nice bandwidth from the chipset and RAM, and the system can overclock somewhat. The system appears to be limited in overclocking by the RAM, but in the case of an HTPC it is not a big loss. The system is not used for resource-heavy applications normally…

I did recently figure out how to make an advanced system look silly. I recorded (I thought) two hours of TV one night for our viewing enjoyment the next night. Only problem was, when I woke up the next morning the unit was still recording! I stopped the recording and opened the 8 hour long, 21GB file in Studio 8… Yes, I did say 21GB file. This appeared to freeze the computer for a long, long time! After the program ‘found’ all of the scenes and cataloged them, I cut the scenes I wanted, combined them and encoded them. This would work faster with an HT processor and faster Front Side Bus, and I may need to upgrade if we do end up encoding often.

The good news in all of this is I can easily upgrade to a 3.6GHz Prescott chip with 1MB of L2 cache with some Dual Channel PC3200 and get faster performance with the same board. The board performs great today, and I can upgrade it in the near future if needed. If the prices of SATA drives come down, I can also set up two SATA drives in a RAID array for maximum performance or complete mirroring, whichever I want. There are no 1394 Firewire ports, but then I use USB 2.0 for all external connections. The newest chips by Intel will not work with this board, but the Prescotts on 478 pin technologies will not go away any time soon…

Overall

Is this a decent board? All in all, I believe it is. For $50-60 you get support for Prescott chips, dual channel, 4GB RAM support, Good overclocking potential, SATA and SATA RAID capability, and enough ports and slots for any system you want. The layout is good, except for the Audio jack. The chipset performs well, and the system is stable, once you wipe the ‘free’ software from MSI.

Overall I recommend this board for most any application, as it has good performance and a wide variety of options for the user.

Other boards I have owned:

Abit IS7-E motherboard
Abit NF7-M motherboard
Abit KD7A motherboard
ASRock Pe-Pro HT motherboard
Soyo SY-K7VME motherboard


Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 70 ($60 now)