MSI P45 Platinum review and P45 to P35 comparison

Page 2 - Packaging and contents

As I often say - expensive products come in expensive packaging. In a way, MSI do deviate from that cliche with theirs. Instead of the usual ATX motherboard packaging, MSI P45 Platinum is placed in a high box with its own handle. Gaming products also tend to have on their boxes a spaceships or some other futuristic thingamabob. Not here, instead we get an rather synonymous Ork, and should you still not make the connection a great sign stating that the motherboard is an "Gaming product".

The motherboard bundle is rich as expected. Four SATA cables, one IDE and one FLOPPY, Molex power to SATA power adapter. Driver disks for both Windows x86 and Windows x64. Bonus backup software. Bridge for Crossfire, two manuals, USB & Firewire extensions, rear plate for your case, matching the motherboard connectors. And of course the MSI's M-connector, that is a variation of the ASUS Q-connector. Quite handy indeed, you connect the cables from the case to one such block and if you have to remove the motherboard, for testing something, change the cooler of any other reason, when you're finished with it all that has to be done is to connect the block to the pins. And unlike ASUS, MSI had provided you with few "blocks" for connecting every pin, that might interest you, and we talk not only for the motherboard cables.

Ah, and here is the motherboard itself. Even at first sight few things make impression. The first one is that the motherboard has a rather massive and quite wicked heatpipe cooling, with a lot of thought in it too. The radiator plates at the tips of the heatpipes are positioned at the spot assuring high airflow - under the PSU, at the back close to the connectors (where usually a fan for sucking the hot air is present) and between the CPU and the video card. This way whatever kind of air cooler you use for the CPU there always will be airflow through the chipset radiator. The second thing to notice is that the motherboard slots and connectors are well optimized, not just scattered all around upon some designers whim. SATA connectors for example face not upwards but sideways, assuring less of a cable mess, same goes for the IDE connector. The motherboard has a whooping 5 additional fan connectors, with even manual control from BIOS. And last but certainly not least (in fact even maybe most interesting in the monotonous context of the review), we found that some of the colleagues that tested the motherboard before us (Come clean!) had lost the original "plug" protecting the pins of the socket and had replaced it with "Foxconn" one.