MSI P6N SLI Platinum

We want to know what happened to the bronze, silver and gold editions.

We’re a bit ambivalent towards the 650i.

With ASUS offering the hybrid P5N32-E Plus and the onset of the 680i LT, performance wise 650i seems to be lagging, yet as far as price goes it’s still in the game as it offers cheap access to SLI.

MSI’s board comes with all the concessions made by transitioning from 680i to 650i – the single Ethernet port; two PCI-E x8 slots instead of PCI-E x16 (the primary port operates at 16x if you have only one card); support for eight USB instead of ten and four SATA ports instead of six. For most this won’t be an issue, however power users will want to gear for a 965 or 680i board to increase the breadth of features. In a bout of niceness, MSI has also included optical and coax S/PDIF on the back, and thrown in eSATA for good measure. The board is also populated by solid capacitors, no doubt inspired by GIGABYTE’s recent efforts in the field. We appreciate the extra longevity they give, let alone the fact that it’s a lot harder to knock the suckers off by mistake.

Finally there’s a parallel port on the back if you’re still using a printer from the 80s. If you are, let us know your address so we may come and beat you. Parallel ports must die.

One advantage that the 650i holds over the 680i LT is that the board is passively cooled – MSI in this case opting for a heatpipe network rather than the simple passively cooled northbridge and uncooled southbridge present on competitor’s boards. We’re wondering exactly why the southbridge therefore needs to be cooled – perhaps the heatsink is there purely to siphon extra heat from the northbridge.

Regardless, silence is always a bonus in our books, provided that the board can still perform. If you find your overclocking limited, MSI has bundled in an optional northbridge fan, which is unfortunately quite high-pitched and loud.

The biggest disadvantage is of course the manual hardware switch needed for SLI – in essence a card between the GPUs that needs to be popped out and switched around whenever you want to change modes. Possibly this is down to the 650i’s nForce4 heritage in that it uses the nForce 430 MCP, however in an age of software switching it’s an annoyance we didn’t expect.

Booting into the BIOS we found MSI’s ‘Cell’ overclocking menu to be decent enough, and after a bit of tweaking we managed to get the board running solid at 380MHz, but it wouldn’t boot at all above 400MHz. Annoyingly MSI’s BIOS still tells us that the board doesn’t support a 266MHz processor whenever the FSB is overclocked – it still works fine, but it’s clearly a relic warning message from pre-266MHz bus days. Come on guys, get this fixed already.

Layout wise the board is great, the only potential conflict being that the battery is obscured by the graphics card, should you ever need to yank it out. The floppy drive port is also placed at the bottom of the board which may cause issues. In somewhat of a rarity these days, there are two IDE ports for those who need to support older hardware.

Despite its mainstream nature the board works well and delivers performance close to the flagship products, it’s just not highly overclockable and even if MSI offers more than the norm, it is a little bare of feature. As we’ve said a number of times, if you’re never going to go SLI, get a 965 board – they’re much better value. If two NVIDIA GPUs are your thing and you don’t intend to push the limits of your system, then MSI’s P6N Platinum will be more than at home in your system. Ultimately the decision is your wallet’s.

	EVGA nForce 680i SLI	MSI P6N SLI Platinum
Sandra Processor Artihmetic Dhrystone (MIPS)	27,100	27,122
Sandra Processor Arithmetic Whetstone (MFLOPS)	18,593	18,595
Sandra Memory Bandwidth INT (MB/s)	5,571	5,559
Sandra Memory Bandwidth Float (MB/s)	5,637	5,561
3DMark06	10,818	10,918