With all the header connectors located at the bottom of the motherboard, it helps to keep the cables away from the other system devices and the clutter under control.

If you have ever touched the MOSFET's on a motherboard while it's operating you know well how hot they can get. It's nice to see that MSI places passive heatsinks on top of the MOSFET's to help keep them cool. This does wonders for peace of mind and then again computer components can never run too cool.

While I'm not much of a case modder myself (too lazy), those of you who enjoy modding will certainly like the LED fan on the Northbridge. While not necessary, the i875P does generate quite a bit of heat and active cooling is certainly a must for overclockers out there.

There are some motherboards on the market already which rival the MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R's feature set, but many do not include the cables or brackets to take advantage of all the devices. We're extremely pleased to see that MSI bundles every necessary cable or bracket to fully use all the onboard devices with the -FIS2R model.

I guess the only thing the board is missing is dual BIOS'..... that would have come in handy as I accidentally killed the original test unit while flashing the BIOS to revision 1.3 (which is known to kill motherboards and has since been removed from MSI's website).

With so many high speed devices on the motherboard the PCI bus could easily become saturated, it's nice to see that MSI went with an Intel CSA enabled Gigabit NIC. With its direct link to the Northbridge it does not have to fight for bandwidth with the other system devices.

The 82547EI has a direct 16 bit DDR bus that runs at 133 MHz and has a maximum bandwidth of 266MB/s, just enough to keep a fully moving Gigabit NIC happy (Maximum bandwidth for a Gigabit NIC running full duplex is 2Gb/s or 250 MB/s). This also free's up the PCI bus for the other system devices. This system potentially allows for better system performance when all the devices in the system-bus are under load.