MSI P965 Platinum review

1 product related to this article

Introduction

In our recently published article on motherboards suitable for the Core 2 Duo chips, we could only test MSI's entry level motherboard, the P965 Neo-F. This motherboard impressed us because of its stability and performance, bit did not offer many extra features or very good overclocking abilities. Because of these thing the board therefore will not be very popular with enthouiasts or overclockers, but MSI has introduced a new board based on the 965 chipset. The MSI P965 Platinum is their new high end 965 model, and will compete directly with the likes of ASUS' P5B Deluxe and Gigabytes 965P-DQ6.

When the board was officially introduced MSI boasted the board to be the first 965 board with CrossFire compatibility, the board does have two PCI-Express graphics card slots. However this feature is not unique, as boards from both ASUS and Gigabyte offer the same compatibilty with the recently released 6.9 Catalyst drivers. All manufacturers use the same method to offer CrossFire; as there are two graphics card slots, but only one of these can offer the full 16 lanes, the second slot is limited to 4 lanes only. Intel's high-end 975X chipset can offer 2 x 8 lanes, and will be slightly faster in a CrossFire setup in real life performance. Not only the limited bandwith of the 965 chipset will affect performance, also the fact that the signal for the second card has to travel through the north- and southbridge chip before it reaches the card. Gamers that wish to use a CrossFire setup will be better off with a 975X motherboard, but these boards are slightly more expensive than the 965 ones.

When you do not plan on using CrossFire a cheaper 965 board is preferred, as these boards use the newer ICH8 and have a newer memory controller. 975 boards still use the older ICH7, and as stated are more expensive than the 965 boards.