X-bit labs

Experience the Roller Coaster: MSI P35 Platinum Mainboard Review

Category: Mainboards

by Doors4ever

[ 07/06/2007 | 04:52 PM ]

MSI P35 Platinum mainboard is one of the most beautiful solutions on Intel P35 Express chipset. The designer team did a great job, for sure. But did the engineers do a great job as well? We decided to take a real close look at the features and peculiarities of MSI flagship solution in our new review.

Table of contents:

• MSI Mainboard Family on Intel P35 Express Chipset
  
• Closer Look at MSI P35 Platinum: Package and Accessories
  
• PCB Layout and Functionality
  
• Technical Specifications
  
• BIOS
  
• Overclocking
  
• FSB Strap
  
• Performance during Overclocking
  
• Conclusion
  

I don’t think Micro-Star Company needs a special introduction on our site. Founded in the far away 1986, MSI belongs to the largest Taiwanese computer hardware manufacturers, who have been successfully diversifying their business. At this time they are offering a wide range of products including notebooks and servers, mainboards and graphics cards, networking equipment, optical drives and consumer electronics.

And it is not surprising that shortly after the launch of the Intel P35 Express chipset the company rolled out a series of mainboards based on it. We are going to check out the official company web-site to introduce the whole line-up to you, before we move on to the top product of the family – the MSI P35 Platinum mainboard.

MSI Mainboard Family on Intel P35 Express Chipset

The entry level solution is MSI P35 Neo (MS-7360).

The picture above helps us get a general idea of the solution’s functionality: passive chipset cooling, three-phase CPU voltage regulator circuitry, one PCI Express x16 slot, a few additional controllers. We will most likely be right if we say that MSI P35 Neo is a true workhorse, without any sophisticated features, but sufficient to satisfy the needs of a mainstream user.

The same PCB design was used for another mainboard, MSI P35 New Combo (MS-7365).

Both mainboards look almost the same, only the “Combo” word in the model name and multi-color memory slots indicate that the board supports two types of memory. At this time the users will most likely work with the traditional DDR2 only, but later on they will be able to switch to DDR3 SDRAM.

And the top solution in the family, MSI P35 Platinum (MS-7345) is very different from its two younger sisters.

The chipset cooling system built with heat-pipe technology, reinforced processor voltage regulator circuitry, two PCI Express x16 slots, only solid-state capacitors – all these features indicate very clearly that it is a flagship product that would be of primary interest to us today.