MSI K7N2 (MS-6570) Motherboard

Company: Microstar International
Product: MS-6570 K7N2 AMD Motherboard
Street Price: ~$100 USD
Date Reviewed: March 10, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Overall Rating: (8.2/10)

Board Layout and Package Contents:

The MSI K7N2 comes nicely packaged. The actual motherboard itself only had a few minor flaws that we noticed. The first is always the power connectors on the motherboard. The four pin and the 20 pin connectors are located to the left of the socket. This is not the best place for the connectors because the cables can interfere with the heat sink, which can cause issues with the heat sink contacting the CPU. Now actually looking at the socket we also notice that the four holes generally around the socket are not there. Those who want to mount large Swiftech and Alpha heats sinks will be disappointed because they will not be able to use heat sinks that utilize the four holes. The one last thing that we consider a flaw on this motherboard is the location of the primary and secondary IDE slots. They are positioned at the lower right hand corner of the motherboard. This could be an issue for users with full tower cases that have their drives located towards the top of the case. The cables might not reach forcing the user to have to go out and buy longer cables.

On this particular motherboard, MSI has chosen to use passive heat sinks on the voltage regulators. This is a nice addition to help keep them cool. The Northbridge also uses a passive heat sink. The DIMM slots are positioned in a nice spot in relation to the AGP slot. Some users complain that the DIMM slots are too low on some motherboards and that it forces them to have to remove the video card every time they want to change memory. On this board, there is plenty of clearance for even the longer cards like the GeForce 4 TI4600.

Other than the things we mentioned above the rest of the motherboard is typical. There are five PCI slots, one AGP slot, and one Advanced Communication Riser, which was intended for use with Sound Storm. There are two IDE slots capable of supporting up to four drives and a floppy port. The Realtek ALC650 chip provides sound. On the back of the motherboard, there are two PS2 Ports for the mouse and keyboard, one parallel port, one serial port, four USB ports, the sound jacks, and the Ethernet connection.

The motherboard we received also came with the optional S-Bracket, which provides two SPDIF jacks and two analog Line-Out connectors. This allows for 6-channel audio. One other thing that came with this motherboard that is optional is the D-Bracket. This bracket has USB (supports 1.1 and 2.0) and four LEDs that serve as a debugger. It helps users to figure out system failures by providing 16 different combinations of signals. This is a useful feature for troubleshooting. Of course, this mainboard comes with a manual, drivers and utilities CD, IDE cable, and floppy cable. The good thing about the drivers and utilities CD is that it first off provides the necessary drivers for running the NForce 2 chipset as well as all the onboard goodies. Other nice things are that there are several utilities that make the consumers life much easier. There are things like MSI Live Update, which allows the computer to search the web for newer drivers and BIOS’s for the motherboard. This is great because you do not have to go all over the place looking for driver updates. All you have to do is run this program and presto, you are updated.