Conclusion and Score
No overclocking due to BIOS limitations. A shame, given MSI's procrastinating about the 848P Neo-S's prodigious abilities. So what about performance overall? Competent is the word I'd use, pretty good if you can enable PAT. It should be no different from single channel 865PE in the real world, given PAT being enabled. Some memory voltage adjustment would suit this board down to the ground, if nothing else, just to help things along. Hopefully EPoX will oblige in a future BIOS release.So does the 4PLAI make sense, making a good effort at capitalising on 848P's budget market position? It depends on your requirements. If you're looking for a cheap board for something like a 2.4C, for a little media encoding work, or as a temporary stopgap while you wait for new chipsets in 2004, sure. It's light on features, but onboard Ethernet at SATA gives you a decent base to hold a CPU and memory while you wait. Otherwise, even given the stupidly cheap price, I'd be tempted to look elsewhere for P4 excitement and thrills. It's a very bare package and it feels like unless you're on a really tight budget, you'd get much better value for a little more investment higher up the P4 motherboard ladder.
Performance was decent, but the feature cupboard is very bare. For the budget conscious only, 865PE in single channel with the option for dual at a later date is a better bet otherwise. It's £55 from the usual suspects, should you be interested.
Pentium 4 foreplay indeed, it leaves you gagging for the big feature and performance 'O'.
Score
Pros
Good performanceVery cheap
Decent 6 channel audio
Cons
865PE boards are a better bet unless you're really looking to save every last pennyReally bare bundle, not even a pair of SATA cables
No real tweaking options to make the most of it
Thanks
Komplett for the digital camera used to take the shots.EPoX for the sample.
