Conclusion

I have to admit that MSI P6N SLI Platinum left very ambiguous impression. Although it is very well designed and uses high-quality reliable components that guarantee stable operation over the time, there are two things that may spoil this rosy future.

First of all, it is the price. Although MSI P6N SLI Platinum is based on relatively expensive Nvidia nForce 650i SLI core logic set, its price exceeds $170. Therefore, this mainboard appeared more expensive than analogous solutions of the same class. It is priced close to products on Nvidia nForce 680i SLI, which will make it hard for MSI P6N SLI Platinum to become very popular. Although this high product cost is absolutely justified by the massive use of solid-state capacitors, advanced copper cooling system with heatpipes and excellent accessories bundle.

Secondly, the board suffers from BIOS issues that can make overclocking experience much harder on the user. However, I have to be fair here and say that all the above mentioned issues are not fatal and may not affect the overclocking results at all. Besides, we hope that these issues will be eliminated in the future BIOS versions, because our tests showed that MSI P6N SLI Platinum has no hardware defects or issues that would make it impossible.

As a result, MSI P6N SLI Platinum has every chance to succeed in the market if the above mentioned drawbacks will be taken care of in timely manner.

Highs:

• Excellent accessories bundle;
• 1333MHz bus support guaranteed by the manufacturer;
• High-quality solid-state capacitors;
• Original passive cooling system for the mainboard chipset and voltage regulator.

Lows:

• High price;
• No option for saving BIOS settings profiles in the Setup;
• Doesn’t allow reducing CPU clock frequency multiplier on Core 2 Duo processors;
• Strange behavior during Core 2 Extreme X6800 overclocking.