Overclocking

The board was fully stable at 465MHz FSB with a 6x multiplier on an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 and a 1:1 memory:FSB ratio. It booted at 480MHz FSB but ultimately failed to get into Windows. It could possibly be a CPU limitation at such a high FSB since the CPU is now running at 1.8x its usual bus speed and it also delivers a similar bus overclock to what we managed with the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R board we recently reviewed.

Either way, the board overclocks exceptionally well and 465MHz FSB should not be sniffed at!

In order to achieve this, we used a 1.5V northbridge, 1.5V FSB voltage, 1.475V CPU and increasing either of these any more didn't result in more MHz.

Stability

The board survived a full 24 hour stress test, so we can only conclude it is completely stable. Our stress test consists of IOMeter, two lots of Prime95 and FarCry looping throughout. This was all done with CrossFire enabled to really stress the entire subsystem, including the north-southbridge interlink as much as possible.

Even at a relatively early version 1.1 BIOS revision MSI's engineers have done a superb job with this BIOS making it work so well.

Warranty

As usual, the MSI warranty for the board is just two years. This is a little low considering you're investing in quite a bit in something that isn't all that inexpensive, even if it isn't a top-of-the-range Diamond series board. We'd always prefer a longer warranty, especially if you want to use the board as a hand-me-down in a couple of years when you upgrade, so at least another year or two would be good.

Power Consumption

Compared to other boards, especially the Asus Commando which is around the same price the MSI has a lower power consumption in both idle and load. It also has slighly fewer features, with no extra WiFi or second Gigabit Ethernet adapter on board, but it's mostly very much the same.

Conclusion

£118 is great value for this board considering you get more or less a bit of everything. OK, gone are parallel and serial ports and two internal SATA ports may be sacrificed for exclusive use as eSATA, but internally you still do get five SATA 3Gbps ports. Similarly priced boards like the awesome Abit AW9D-MAX has the older ICH7R southbridge but it does CrossFire better with the dual x8 slots. The nForce 680i LT SLI chipset can also be bought for around a similar price, and even though the boards may overclock to a similar degree the aesthetics are far less inspiring.

However, the Asus Commando is only about £10-£15 more expensive and that's a Republic of Gamers board with all the extra features. Even the quite old but still fully loaded Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi AP is cheaper by almost £10. But then again, the P35 supports Intel Turbo Memory, so when that becomes available you can just drop in a PCI-Express x1 module and improve your systems performance. It's still a future development though, unlike the appreciably more useful inclusion of 802.11g WiFi adapter already included on the Asus board.

Comparatively, you could also buy the DS4 version of the Gigabyte P35 board, but the DS4 is in more of a no man's land between the very capable and vast DS3 range and high end all inclusive DQ6's, where the equivalent MSI P35 Diamond lies. The P35 Platinum could have a few more PCI slots, but PCI-Express x1 is now just starting to take off more so it should become less of an issue.

Final Thoughts

The feature set is solid, it looks great and offers enough to keep the majority of people interested. The box could offer a few more extras like additional USB ports and the board's eSATA solution is inferior to Gigabyte's optional bracket. However, if you're a fan of quiet computing and want something rock solid stable with an enthusiast friendly BIOS, superb overclocking and a not too stressing price, then the MSI P35 Platinum should definitely be one to consider.

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

What do these scores mean?