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Introduction

Since its release last quarter, Intel's 875P "Canterwood" Chipset has been lighting up the benchmarks. Last week we had chance see some of those impressive benchmarks with Gigabytes 875P offering, the Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra. If you recall, we looked at the architectures of both the 875P and 865PE and were hard pressed to find much difference. As we pointed out, Intel incorporates their PAT (Performance Acceleration Technology) with their 875P, which is really a pretty fancy term for chip binning of the (MCH) Memory Controller Hubs. The better MCH chips go to the 875P and the lesser performance rated ones go to the 865PE. Due to the release order of the chipsets (the 875P being first out), we have yet to benchmark the 865PE; We do However, have two 865PE boards warming up the bench and early indicators do show that there are in fact significant performance differences due to PAT. In the coming motherboard series, we'll look at the 865PE chipsets and how they stack up against the 875P. However, this week we're going to have another look at the 875P platform.

The subject of today's review comes from the MSI 875P Neo line. This series comes in a few flavors depending on the included features; the board we are going to look at is the full featured version the MSI 875P NEO-FIS2R.

We're going to see some interesting overclocking features from MSI; such as CoreCell technology, and another lesser, but very interesting addition to the board that I'll keep under wraps until later in the article. Also for mod fans there is an interesting twist for the Northbridge cooling system. All in all I think you'll find this an interesting read so lets move on and see what's "under the hood"