Verdict: It's sly, but it's not SLI

The K8N Neo4 Platinum is based on the nForce4 Ultra chipset, which means that it has the usual set of features, including four RAID-capable S-ATA II and four S-ATA ports, 8-channel audio and twin Gigabit Ethernet. However, what makes this board unusual is that it has a 4x PCI-E slot, in addition to its 16x PCI-E slot.

The 4x PCI-E slot (which, oddly, supports only 2x speeds) sits just above the 16x PCI-E slot, strangely enough in exactly the same position where the second slot would be on an SLI motherboard. A little bird told us that SLI would work with it, and with a little tweaking, it does, although it certainly isn't easy to set up.

To start with, you need an SLI bridge, which isn't included with the motherboard. Some companies have started selling these separately, but they still aren't easy to get hold of, so eBay is probably your best bet. You'll then have to do a little modification to the chipset. Using a soft pencil, we connected two bridges on the surface of the chipset to convert it from an nForce4 Ultra into an nForce4 SLI. Unfortunately, the latest drivers from Nvidia are clever enough to detect the 8x/2x PCI-E lane configuration instead of the official 8x/8x configuration and won't allow SLI to work with this board. With older ForceWare 71.40 drivers, however, it works quite happily.

Using older drivers is never good, though, as newer drivers are faster and have improved game support for SLI. Hopefully, a working driver will be provided in the near future.

Surprisingly, the performance results were almost identical to those of the true SLI motherboards. Interestingly, during testing, we noticed how the first graphics card was much warmer than the second. We expect the second card isn't being fully utilised, so two PCI-E lanes appear to provide enough bandwidth for modern GPUs. However, when the next generation of graphics cards arrives, and as drivers become more efficient, it's likely that the lower bandwidth of the 2x PCI-E slot will become an issue.

Overclocking this board was a breeze, as there are lots of options in the BIOS. By lowering the multiplier of our test CPU, the board was quite happy to run with an FSB of 330MHz, which is more than fast enough for even the most insane overclocker.

Being able to hack an nForce4 Ultra board into an SLI board is great, but at £112.59, it's just as expensive as the Gigabyte SLI motherboard. So, cool factor aside, there's really no reason to choose the MSI over the Gigabyte.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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