MSI P45 Platinum review and P45 to P35 comparison

Through the last year Intel P35 became famous for its capabilities and vast overclock potential. So when in the middle of June the first motherboards with its heir - P45 became available, hardware enthusiasts all over the globe were eager to find out how is it performing. well, now with us we have an MSI P45 Platinum, motherboard from the high class line of MSI, one that is said to provide high performance, lots of options for overclock and a whole bunch of power saving doohickeys. Does it really? It's up to us to find out...

MSI are in the business with motherboards, expansion cards and various other hardware for well over two decades, but through the last few years the company is constantly pushing to impress and to get into favour with a particularly hard to please customer group - gamers and hardware enthusiast (better known as overclockers). That's why top model video cards with factory raised frequencies, motherboards with extravagant and huge chipset coolers and greatly customizable in terms of voltage, bus speed and timings BIOS versions appeared. MSI are also heavily emphasizing on the "green" in their products, making their components by Eco-friendly methods and using power saving technologies such as "GreenPower". The motherboard in this review - the MSI P45 Platinum, has all of the above covered and that is exactly what tickled our curiosity.

The P45 chipset is the heir of the P35 and in this role offers some advantages. The most obvious of them being the improved Crossfire (two or more AMD videocards working in one system) support, since the North bridge is directly connected to two PCI-E 2.0 16x slots, even though in Crossfire mode they will share the bus in half thus each card will be working at only 8x mode. Still this is quite an improvement because the Crossfire support with the P35 was mostly "incidental". Yes, since there the slots were PCI-E 1.1, in Crossfire the first of them was running at 16x, but the second was in reality well masked 4x slot, that wasn't even connected to the North bridge, it was instead connected to the South ICH9 or ICH8 bridge, thus crippling the performance of the second card by far. Yet since the other differences between P45 and P35 aren't too great, and the P35 being still far from time to retire, this review must be viewed as direct comparison between the performance and capabilities of P35 and P45. Now let's see in short what does the MSI P45 Platinum offer:

• Support for socket 775 Intel Core 2 Extreme, Quad, Duo and Pentium processors with 1,600, 1,333, 1,066 or 800MHz FSB
• Intel P45 north bridge
• Intel ICH10R south bridge
• Four DDR2 DIMM slots supporting up to 16GB of memory at 1,200, 1,066, 800 or 667MHz
• Realtek ALC888 audio codec supporting 7.1 channel High-Definition surround sound
• One Realtek RTL8111C PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet connector
• One PCI-Express x16 2.0 slot (x16 or x8 electrical)
• One PCI-Express x16 2.0 slot (x8 electrical)
• Two PCI-Express x1 slots
• Two PCI slots
• Six SATA 3Gbps ports including support for RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5
• Two SATA 3Gbps ports from JMicron JMB363 chipset
• One eSATA 3Gbps port from JMicron JMB361 chipset
• One IDE and one floppy port
• Two IEEE1394a Firewire sockets from a JMicron JMB381 chipset
• Twelve USB 2.0 ports (six on rear I/O and six via pin-outs)
• Onboard power, reset and clear CMOS buttons
• DrMOS Power and GreenPower efficiency features

Well as you all know, promises from the manufacturer are always grand. What we must and will do is to check how much of them will turn out to be true.