X-bit labs

DDR2 or DDR3: MSI P35 Platinum Combo Mainboard Review (page 10)

Category: Mainboards

by Doors4ever

[ 02/29/2008 | 04:37 PM ]

Software

MSI P35 Platinum Combo mainboard comes bundled with two CD disks with drivers and utilities for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Each of them first of all offers to install the drivers:

The list of available software for Windows XP is quite impressive:

• CoreCenter
• DigiCell
• DualCoreCenter
• FuzzyLogic
• LiveUpdate
• LockBox
• PCAlert
• PWKeeper
• SecureDoc
• SmartKey
• V-Center

The Windows Vista package is a little bit more modest and includes only Live Update 3, Dual Core Center and Dual Core Center sidebar. Let’s install these applications.

Live Update 3

Even from the name of the Live Update program you can understand that it searches online for the latest BIOS updates. It can search not only for the mainboard updates, but also for the graphics card and installed MSI utilities updates.

You can enable/disable automatic program launch on Windows start-up, MSI news, you can even change the interface colors, but there was no option to reflash the BIOS from the image file. This feature could be very useful for a testbed that is not connected to the Web yet, because MSI mainboard doesn’t have a built-in BIOS reflashing tool.