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Specification
The MSI P6N SLI Platinum is not cheap, to start with. Its price is over $170, which is considerably more than the price of the ASUS P5N-E SLI mainboard that uses the same chipset. Why? Because the MSI mainboard is a top-quality product with increased reliability due to solid-state capacitors with a polymer electrolyte and to an original chipset cooling solution. Less demanding users are offered the P6N SLI, a similar but less expensive product, which doesn’t differ much from the Platinum version in terms of functionality. We’ll be discussing the MSI P6N SLI Platinum in this review as the more interesting product of two, but most of what we are going to say applies to the ordinary MSI P6N SLI as well.
One glance over the mainboard is enough to tell you that it is a feature-rich product.
This is confirmed by the mainboard’s official specification.
MSI P6N SLI Platinum | |
CPU | LGA775 processors: Celeron D, Pentium 4, Pentium D, |
Chipset | NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI (C55 SPP + nForce 430 MCP) |
FSB frequencies | 133-750MHz (with 1MHz increment) |
Overclocking-friendly | Adjustable Vcore, Vmem, North Bridge voltage. |
Memory | 4 DDR2 DIMM slots for dual-channel |
PCI Express x16 slots | 2 (with NVIDIA SLI support in 8x + 8x mode) |
PCI Express x1 slots | 1 |
PCI expansion slots | 3 |
USB 2.0 ports | 8 (4 – on the rear panel) |
IEEE1394 ports | 2 IEEE1394a ports |
ATA-100/133 | 2 ATA-133 channels (in the chipset) |
Serial ATA | 4 Serial ATA-300 channels (by the chipset, with RAID support) |
ATA RAID support | RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 in the chipset |
Integrated sound | 8-channel HD codec: Realtek ALC888 |
Integrated LAN | Gigabit Ethernet (in the chipset) |
Additional features | None |
BIOS | AMIBIOS8 |
Form-factor | ATX, 305mm x 245mm |
The specification suggests that we are dealing with a typical mainstream mainboard comparable to the ASUS P5N-E SLI and to most iP965-based solutions in functionality. There is nothing very exceptional about the MSI P6N SLI Platinum from this point of view.
