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refurbished MSI K7N420 PRO nForce for $99 free ship at newegg

check this review hard ocp review

Conclusions and Delusions:
MSI's K7N420 Pro is a pretty impressive piece of hardware, no matter what angle you are looking at it from. I think there are some definite issues to get worked out, but overall the board is extremely impressive. Oddly enough, the board is NOT impressive from an integrated video standpoint if you are going to be using this box for gaming much. Ironic, considering that NVIDIA is the number graphics provider on the planet. This integrated graphics chipset it not aimed at the hardcore 3D game player but yet the casual folks that can get by with much less than what is acceptable among the gaming crowd. Still the addition of integrated graphics might ease the upgrade path for many of you out there. There are still many folks with GF2 MX cards in there boxes that do game just fine!

I am certainly impressed with what I have experienced so far. The numbers this board were able to generate were nothing short of fantastic coming from a new mainboard chipset provider. With time and experience in this arena, NVIDIA will no doubt get better, the issues like the EAX Driver support will be a thing of the past. MSI on the other hand needs to address the BIOS or southbridge issue that causes systems to fail to reboot after overclocking. ESPECIALLY when they are targeting the "performance crowd" and "overclockers" alike. We have been assured that this will be looked into immediately.
 
IMO I would also look at the
MSI 850 Pro5 (MS6545) INTEL 850 RAMBUS 400MHz FSB SOCKET 478 ATX Hardware Audio on Board MOTHERBOARD , 89$, and get a 1.6A northridge
 
this board comes with graphics (gf2 mx) with 5.1 dolby sound and lan right?


Looks like a great deal if putting together a cheap box
 


<< this board comes with graphics (gf2 mx) with 5.1 dolby sound and lan right?


Looks like a great deal if putting together a cheap box >>



Yep. THe only problem w/ using it for a "cheap box" is that you gotta use two sticks of DDR (to enable Twinbank) in order for the onboard video to perform as you would expect a GF2MX. With one stick it is SEVERELY hampered because of the lack of enough memory bandiwdth to support both the video & CPU. However, the extra money you gotta spend on two sticks of RAM is probably at least offset by having worth-while integrated vid, sound, and NIC.


j
 
that is true but unless u are going to using more than one gig of ram it isn't going to cost you much more to get 2 sticks of 128 (if u going for 256) or 2 sticks of 256 (512).
 
It's an excellent deal. I won a bid on the same board through Ubid.com ($105) and I'm very impressed with it... it's especially nice that I don't have to drop money on a graphics card until I'm ready. The board matches perfectly with Gainward cards and the new Ti4600's from them looks very impressive. The board is very stable, the sound is excellent, plus it has onboard LAN. Some vendors seemed to be trying to unload these boards cause they haven't sold very well. They're just a little too pricey for the budget minded and at the other end of the spectrum people don't want to buy features like Video that they aren't going to use. I personally think it's a great board, and as long as you don't pay a premium for the extra features than you should go for it. Hell my local PC store is trying to sell the board for $200... now that's a joke.

These are the only bad points that I can think of:

- video uses the system RAM which is fairly slow
- board only supports 133mhz(266) FSB and PC2100 memory... has a decent amount of overclocking features though.
- memory controller "fix"(problem) with using certain combonations of memory slots... really only allows for effective use of 2 out of 3 of the dimm slots.

+terrific sound
+LAN
+Decent on board graphics, and an AGP slot for expansion

 
FYI
Don't wait to install it once received. I just got an MSI 266a board and so far no luck. Fans spins for a second the nothing. Reset cmos, checked battery, switched PS and still nothing. Going to try another case just out of curiousity and then RMA it to them.
 
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