MSI X58 Platinum

A dream motherboard for a dream chip - a great home for your Nehalem beast!

We’ve been fawning over both Nehalem and the new X58 mobos for the past few months in the Labs. We’d even go as far to say that we’ve been dreaming about it – and this just might be the dream board for you.

The back panel is elegantly arranged, with two PS/2 ports, Firewire, Optical, eight USB, eSATA, clear CMOS, two Ethernet ports and 7.1 audio ports. This is extremely opulent, but at the same time, it is very welcome – you’ll be able to connect just about anything you’d like to back here!

The expansion slots, located in their usual place, are relatively well thought out and have plenty of room for Crossfire or SLI with dual slot cards. There are also three fan headers here – great for rear exhaust fans, or sidepanel ones. The board battery will be blocked by the top card, but that’s where the clear CMOS button comes in handy. Along the bottom of the board are two more buttons – power and reset. For those who like an out-of-case experience when ‘clocking, this is a very handy feature. Next to these buttons are three little switches, which facilitate overclocking of the board, though we’d prefer to stick with the BIOS. Two USB headers are also here, which can give you up to four more ports. Front panel and case headers are in the lower right corner, and the positive pins are noted – this is a godsend for getting the LEDs working the first time.

Right above this is a little socket that looks like an anti-header. Rather, this is where an included POST screen plugs in, giving you access to a VFD-styled screen if you want it – a great and actually useful idea. Another nifty feature is the right angled IDE and SATA ports (though two SATA are the typical vertical ones), keeping cabling out of the way of large cards, and easing cable management considerably. There are another two fan headers just behind these SATA ports, which are good for intake fans (or if you just like having a header there for +12V emergencies - this happens more often than you’d think).

The 24- and 8-pin power connectors are all in the usual places, and the six DDR3 ports are quite typical, with the black slots being dominant (and needing population before the more submissive blues). Funnily enough, something about the latches on these slots feels much better than any other board we’ve used to date. The CPU socket has room a-plenty for large coolers, and has a small forest of solid caps around it. Oddly, the CPU fan header is placed a little away from the socket, just above the DRAM slots. This still works fine, but is just rather different.

One area that this board does fall down slightly is the Northbridge cooling, in that it really can’t cope with an overclocked system and no airflow. At only 3.6GHz, we recorded a temp of 74 degrees! This amount of heat is really quite bad for stability, and we couldn’t run benchmarks until we introduced an 8cm fan, which brought temps down to the low fifties – much better. Another little quirk was that the i965 chip was detected with a QPI speed of 4.8GT/s, when the actual speed should have been 6.4GT/s. We fixed this easily via the BIOS, but it’s just something to be aware of until they fix this in a BIOS update.

The BIOS itself is very succinct with it’s options, and there’s plenty of room to tweak; we hit a maximum stable speed of 163 QPI, and could have easily gone further if not for the hot northbridge holding us back (even with a fan). This is a very good board, and you really won’t be disappointed if you pick it up.