Date 2007-08-20
Provider: MSI
Author: Niko Lupala
Editor: Amber Lupala
MSI K9N4 SLI Motherboard Review
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Inside you will find a driver cd and a manual. You also get a few accessories along with the board. As you can see you got the back I/O plate, flat IDE cable and a SATA cable.
The thing that struck me was that again they have not included a rounded IDE cable. I wonder if the reason is that they want to save money on them?
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As this board supports SLI, you get a SLI video link card. These days it is a card, compared to the old Voodoo card days where it was a cable you used between the cards.
The board has a nice red PCB, the color scheme is pretty nice with yellow and white ports on the PCI slots.
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The socket is a standard AM2 socket. The cooler are very easy to install with either a clip system or with the four screws. MSI have left some space around the socket for even bigger cpu coolers. The ram slots are green and orange and the IDE ports are placed just below them on the motherboard, this is perfect placement as the harddrives are usually mounted at the same height.
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The ATX and 12V power connector is placed above the cpu socket. Personally I don't like the placement of them, since if you have a bigger cpu cooler it will be very tight to mount or dismount the cables.
The south bridge is equipped with a cpu fan to maintain stability of the board. The fan is placed between the SLI ports on the board.
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On the bottom left corner you will find the SATA ports along with the Cmos reset button. On the left side you also got several USB and firewire connectors.
The SLI ports are yellow colored while the PCI ports are white. This board supports two videocards in SLI. You don't usually get SLI for 90$USD so this feature really gives this board many pro“s.
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In the back of the card you will find the Ps2 ports along with the now old, LPTI1 printer port, and seriell port. You also get four USB ports and a network card port. The sound card offers surround sound as you have six connectors for the different speakers in your surround system.
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