MSI P965 Platinum review

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Features

The MSI P965 Platinum sports socket 775, and can be equipped with all types of Core 2 Duo, Pentium D and Pentium 4 processors. You can use a total of 4 DDR2-800 memory modules and the board sports next to the two already mentioned PCI-Express graphics slots a further two PCI-Express x1 slots and two convententional PCI slots.

As most of the boards of other manufacturers MSI chose to cool the north and southbridsge passively, but not through the use of heatpipes. MSI just placed a big heatsink on the northbridge, and we could not find any cooling for the current stabilisors, which we see as a shortcoming.

As stated before the board uses the ICH8R southbridge, and offers room for six SATA-300 drives. The -R version offers teh possibility to use 6 drives in RAID 0,1 and 5. As the ICH8 does not offer support for Parallel ATA MSI uses a JMicron JMB361 chip that sports one PATA channel and an extra SATA port.

The P965 Platimum only has one gigabit network port, in the form of Realteks RTL811B PCI-Express chip. FireWire is on the board as well, and is supplied through VIA's VT6307 chip. The High Definition 7.1 onboard audio is possible beacuse of the Realtek ALC883 chip that MSI has placed on the PCB.

The motherboards BIOS offers quite a few ways of overclocking your processor, the FSB can be changed in steps of 1MHZ to a maximum of 500MHz and the vCore can be changed to almost 2.1 Volts. The board however has a 4 fase power supply for the CPU, which makes it very doubtfull if these maximum settings can be reached. The memory voltage can be changed to a maximum of 2.45Volt and the northbrigde voltage to 1.69Volts. If you have no experience in overclocking through the BIOS you can use MSI's dynamic overclocking system, which automatically ups the FSB when the system requires a lot of processing power.

The BIOS does offer a boot-menu, as most recent ones do, however it does lack an integrated flash menu and the possibility of saving profiles, something that is very usefull for overclockers.