MSI P45 Platinum

Atomic loves heatpipes, ever so much. We need them in green…

In recent years, MSI has begun to rival GIGABYTE in the ‘giant cooling’ market, and this mobo is no different. With a very elaborate heatpipe network (manufactured by Zalman no less), culminating in a central volcano of erupting pipes and copper fins, the cooling is so large that it takes up the top expansion slot, and some room on the back panel!

The unfortunate result of the engorged cooling (apart from looking so damn cool) is that larger heatsinks (like the one used in testing) will not fit in all orientations, and may not fit at all depending on how wide it is on all sides. While it may seem excessive, the cooling array became quite warm during testing, due to the power regulation also contributing to the load.

The heatpipes almost brush up against the DDR2 slots, but there is just enough room to access the modules without removing the graphics card – great for lazy tech writers and enthusiasts alike. 24-pin and eight-pin power are in the usual places, with FDD, right-angled IDE and eight SATA ports (six are right-angled) all lined up on the edge of the board. All ports will be accessible during Crossfire.

Power and reset buttons are available, as well as USB and Firewire headers. There are two PCI slots for those with sound cards or TV tuners, and a dual-slot gap between the larger PCIe slots – great for airflow to the cards when paired up. The back panel includes six USB, eSATA, one Ethernet, audio, Firewire and a clear CMOS button that turned out to get a lot of use during testing.

When we installed this board into our test rig however, we were met with a very sad end. Our first board refused to POST (we guess that the magic smoke leaked out somehow), so a replacement was grabbed. This allowed benchmarks at stock settings, but any amount of overclocking caused the board not to POST, until the CMOS was cleared.

With nice features and eccentric cooling, this board nonetheless can’t be recommended right now – unless you have a burning love for heatpipe artwork.