I was wondering which one of these is better....ASUS p4P800 or the MSI Neo2 board. I mean ASUS has 865 chipset...and well MSI uses 865pe...whats the differences?

naaaa MSI ..
I would only choose Abit ASUS or EPOX ... nothing else ...

I just finished building a system for my girlfriend last night that includes a 3.0/800 P4 installed in the P4P800 from ASUS. Odly enough, over-clocked to 3.15GHz it actually runs about 2 C degrees COOLER than it does at stock settings (no idea why though). And that's with a stock Intel HSF!

Aside from that, the BIOS has TONS of tweakable settings and is very user friendly. Also installed a Seagate Barracuda SATA 80GB hard drive which is VERY fast. The P4P800 has a ton of features too like 8 USB ports (she has 6 USB devices connected at the moment), 2 SATA ports, 3Com Gigabit lan, etc., but no FireWire port (I need to pick that up for her).

Her previous system had/has an ASUS MB as well and a P3 Tualatin chip (very cool running chip) and I've always been impressed with the stability of ASUS boards, as well as the performance and features. Good "bang for the buck", as they say, and after spending most of last night setting it up, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better platform for the P4 (IMHO).

As far as the differences between the two chipsets that ASUS and MSI are using, go to their respective web sites and figure it out. I'm sure Intel has a ton of information on their website covering those chipsets too. We're talking about YOUR [future] system here, right? It may behove you to do a little INDEPENDENT research of your own.

Later.

Well I have the MSI board...and i got 4 on board usb ports, but no firewire as well(thats fine cause ive never used firewire in my life). It doesent come with gigabit ethernet, which i never saw a point in unless you do major file transfers between 2 gigabit comuters(wich I never have done). One thing I did like about the MSI was the core cell technology..it lets me overclock on the fly..without haveing to reboot. I used to have an ASUS I upgraded from a P4S533 board, and I had nothin but probs with it. Right out of the box the ps2 ports didnt work...thank god i had usb keyboard and mouse, and the only way i could overclock my chip was to use the jumpers on the board which sucked. Well thats all I wanted to say...I'm off to Intel.com to see what i can find