MSI P965 Platinum

'Platinum' implies all sorts of things that this board isn't.

It’s fair to say that the 965 series has firmly entrenched itself in the minds and hearts of the Core 2 wielding folk of the world. While those who want SLI or a slight bit more of an overclock are jumping all over the 680i, the 965P still represents stellar performance at very good value.

MSI’s entry to the 965 series is aimed more at the budget-end, despite the Platinum moniker. This is evident through its lacklustre overclocking, unable to push our X6800 stably any further than 3.287GHz – a good 523MHz less than the EVGA 680i, and almost the same distance from Gigabyte’s GA-965P-DQ6. It did manage to boot into Windows at 3.5GHz, but Stress Prime 2004 went down in a burning, screaming heap of red warning dialogues not three seconds into the test. Still, it’s vastly cheaper than the aforementioned boards, so we weren’t expecting a huge overclock in the first place. Nonetheless the array of decent overclocking options in the BIOS had us hoping.

The budget aspect is reinforced by the presence of parallel (Die! Die parallel, die! With a falafel in your hand!) and serial (Die! If engineers want to program through ancient technology, give them ancient boards!) ports, and a single gigabit network adaptor (Die! Oh no wait… we want that one. Still, a second would be nice). Onboard sound is still there of course, with both coax and digital S/PDIF.

There’s a total of 10 USB ports supported (four on the back, two extra on a supplied backing plate and the rest available through motherboard header), with one 6-pin FireWire 400 port on the back – and another 6-pin and 4-pin supplied on a secondary bracket. Unfortunately you’ll have to choose which
one you want, as although there are two leads to hook up, there’s only one header on the motherboard.

Seven SATA ports, one IDE port and one floppy connector do storage duties (courtesy of ICH8 and the JMicron JMB361 controller), and the usual four memory slots are there. MSI has once again coloured them oddly – while most manufacturers colour the slots to identify which ones should be used for dual channel, in an MSI board for dual channel you need to stick your RAM in different coloured slots.

In a method akin to the Americans spending thousands of dollars on a pen that works in space, and the Russians just using pencils, there’s a complete lack of PCI-E retention clips, MSI opting to rely on the pressure of two plastic extensions instead – which is simple, and works absolutely fine. It also means you don’t have to go fishing around in the depths of your case to find the release clasp – you can just yank your graphics card right out.

The board is passively cooled, with no fans or heatpipes in sight – just two small heatsinks that get moderately hot over time.

A decent recovery system is in place should you push your board too far in the overclocking stakes, although the BIOS will humorously tell you that it doesn’t support 266MHz processors the moment you boot above stock speeds.

MSI’s top of the range 965 offering is not so much a Platinum as it is a Silver. Still it does the job, and if you’re looking to save money and don’t care about overclocking it’ll do quite well as the bed for your budget/mainstream system.

	EVGA nForce 680-SLI	MSI P965 Platinum
Sandra Processor Arithmetic Dhrystone (MIPS)	27,100	26,868
Sandra Procssor Arithmetic Whetstone (MFLOPS)	18,593	18,308
Sandra Memory Bandwidth INT (MB/s)	5571	5534
Sandra Memory Bandwidth FLOAT (MB/s)	5637	5534
3DMark06	5259	5274