Altera DE2 Board vs Altera NEEK Kit, which would you choose and why?

[Altera_Forum]

They both have a cyclone device and are quite similar, NEEK Kit is more geared towards embeded applications and has a huge LCD with different type of ports. Which would you prefer out of the two and why? The board is to be used for experiments at home to learn more about FPGAs and what they can do.

[Altera_Forum]

I haven't used the DE-2 before so I can't give an opinion but one thing I would say is if the DE-2 board relies on the Altera SDRAM IP then you might have an easier time using the NEEK. Cyclone III supports Altmemphy which is a newer memory controller that is supported in Qsys. If the DE-2 board has DDR-SDRAM and relies on Altera IP to drive it that means you'll have to use the legacy controller which isn't supported in Qsys. 

 Maybe you should describe what you need and we can make a recommendation, perhaps the perfect board for what you want to do is neither of these two and we can let you know that.

[Altera_Forum]

For learning purposes, I would go with the DE2. There's a wealth of resources across the internet for reference designs. 

 Here's a couple of examples: http://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece5760/ http://www.altera.com/education/univ/materials/digital_logic/tutorials/unv-tutorials.html  Here's a list of schools that use the DE2 and links to their pages: http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?language=english&categoryno=12&no=329  The NEEK board is suited towards developing with Nios II, and the reference designs you will find are geared towards this.   As you are learning about the potential about FPGAs, you would want to stick with implementing things in hardware. As for the memory issue pointed out by  matrixofdynamism, the DE2 board only uses SDRAM, not DDR. 

[Altera_Forum]

I found that there were way more reference designs applicable to me on the NEEK board. The LCD and related design are nicely integrated into a nice compact (and portable) unit. I wanted to move to a newer FPGA platform, though, so I went with the Helio View kit this time around. It's like NEEK but uses the Cyclone V SoC device, and includes HDMI ports instead of VGA. It's quite new, so not so many reference designs yet, but if NEEK was any indication, that should change pretty quickly.