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In the Box..
The MSI K7N420 Pro ships with a few interesting goodies in the box which, by the way, features a cool futuristic motorcycle race image appealing to the bike geek in me. There's a sheet of paper giving instructions to use a "larger heatsink and fan", thermal grease and make sure it's securely fastened with good CPU contact. The manual I found a little dissapointing - a bit too generic. It covers all the motherboard features and contains the usual helpful notes like "Never pour any liquid into the opening that could cause damage or electrical shock" but in a couple of places it's not specific enough. For example, on page 2-15 it talks about the fan headers and says "if the mainboard has a System Hardware Monitor chipset onboard you must use a specially designed fan with speed sensor to take advantage of the CPU fan control". For someone looking to see how many of the headers can be monitored by software, being told that the manual doesn't even know if the motherboard has a monitoring chip onboard is not helpful. The BIOS section also seems to be fairly generic and I imagine prepared by the BIOS vendor, not by MSI specifically for this motherboard.
Anyway, also in the box are a few cables - of course a floppy cable but only a single 80-pin IDE cable. More interesting are these other cables, though:
At top-left of that image is a plain twin-USB connector as shipped with many motherboards these days. This simply lets you access another two USB ports via a spare backing plate. The cable at bottom right is more interesting - it's what MSI call their "D-Bracket" and also contains two USB headers - but also has a cluster of 4 LED's:
The idea behind these is pretty simple, it's just an extension of the MSI D-LED technology we've seen before, whereby a simple diagnostic system provides error messages on the motherboard for you. This just carries the same idea outside the case so you can see it a bit more easily when things go wrong. For example, this is what it looks like when all's well:
Whereas this is what it looks like when things are not too good. There are 16 possible combinations for it to report, in this instance it's failing during "Early chipset initialization" because the FSB was set too high. However, I found that removing the video card and using the onboard made it happy again, so a message more specifically related to the AGP would have been more helpful:
Still, it's a lot better than being completely in the dark as you often are when your machine won't boot. Note that this board doesn't have an ATX standby power indicator LED on it. These are useful for reminding yourself not to pull out RAM, PCI and other still-powered components when the machine is turned off but the PSU is still switched on. I was hoping the D-Bracket would stay lit in this instance but it doesn't.
The last cable is this SPDIF connector:
This is a digital connection to speakers or Hi-Fi components that support it. I imagine this will be used to connect the onboard Dolby Digital 5.1 controller to your amplifier if you were to make this motherboard part of a home theatre setup. It does seem a bit of a waste to dedicate an entire backplate to this connector. Maybe they could have put it onto one of the USB panels?
The final inclusion is a thin foil case badge saying simply "Geared by MSI". This is fairly cheap looking and I think only the obsessives who cover their PC's in badges for every component will use it. Anyway, on the next page we'll get to the juicy bits - how does it perform?
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