MSI designed the K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI motherboard around NVIDIA's popular nForce4 SLI chipset, which supports AMD's Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX socket-939 processors. Support for the new Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor and Sempron were added in recent BIOS updates.
MSI also provides a free "upgrade" service for qualifying K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI and K8N Neo4/SLI owners to ensure their motherboard is compatible with the Athlon 64 X2 and GeForce 7800 GTX.
MSI K8N Neo4/SLI Motherboard
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The K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI features two PCI-Express 16X slots, dual-channel DDR memory, two independent Serial ATA controllers, two ATA-133 IDE controllers, two 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet ports, and Creative's Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit processor.
While the motherboard may be the foundation of a computer system, the stars in this review are the two MSI NX7800GTX graphics cards. SLI-certified motherboards contain two PCI Express X16 slots, each of which accepts a PCI Express graphics card. When the two graphics cards are linked using an external SLI bridge connector, which is not shown in the photograph below, the driver recognizes the configuration and allows SLI Multi-GPU mode to be enabled. In SLI Multi-GPU mode the driver configures both graphics cards as a single device.
