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| Introduction and Specifications | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Just around this time three years ago, Intel launched their 925X and 915 motherboard platforms, bringing to market a new microprocessor socket, support for DDR2 memory, and support for PCI Express. Although the chipsets were decent performers and had good features, Intel was criticized for forcing the adoption of these new technologies when the market wasn’t really demanding it. At that time, Intel’s NetBurst processors trailed AMD’s and the company caught a lot of criticism from motherboard partners, OEM computer manufacturers, and press alike.
Fast forward to today, and we are in a completely different situation. Intel has received accolades for their
One of the first companies to market with a DDR2 variant of the Intel P35 chipset is MSI, with the MSI P35 Platinum motherboard we’ll be reviewing today.
Since the MSI P35 Platinum is targeted at the mainstream, the package contents of the board are very basic. Along with the standard documentation and driver disk, the P35 Platinum is equipped with four SATA cables, a PATA cable, a Molex to SATA power adapter, a PCI firewire port, and a back I/O panel. |
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| MSI P35 Platinum Features and Layout |
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Probably the first thing one notices when looking at the MSI P35 Platinum is the board’s unique heat pipe design. In what can most easily be described as a ‘roller coaster’ heat pipe implementation, the board has a single heat pipe that connects the south bridge, north bridge, and CPU / memory voltage regulators, passively cooling all three.
The P35 Platinum uses the same black PCB that MSI has used in recent mid-ranged motherboards including the MSI 965 Platinum and MSI K9N Platinum. The board itself didn’t have any obvious design flaws and working with it yielded no serious problems.
The board’s roller coaster heat pipe isn’t the only new and unique feature the P35 brings to the table. MSI has also decided to drop most legacy I/O ports (leaving the PS/2 keyboard and mouse inputs). Dropping serial and Parallel ports frees up enough real estate to offer a total of six USB 2.0 ports on the back panel. Notice how four of the six USB 2.0 ports are spaced out between each other, this is to accommodate multiple USB memory sticks and devices that take up more room than standard USB devices, like some oversized flash drives. The P35 Platinum also has 5.1 audio inputs, a firewire port, an optical PSDIF port, and two eSATA ports on the back I/O panel.
The P35 Platinum’s heat pipe design is reminiscent of the ASUS A8N SLI Premium released a few years back, but taken to the next level. The P35 Platinum’s heat pipe did an excellent job of dissipating heat and was never at a point where it was too hot too touch during the review process. It’s refreshing to see a motherboard manufacturer put extra time and effort into designing a solution that can cool not only the board’s south and north bridges, but also its voltage regulators, as they can get extremely hot and cause instability when overclocking.
The board’s 8 pin power connector has an extension already attached which thankfully makes connecting the cable inbetween the heat-pipe jungle an easy task. Here we can also see the molex PCI Express power connector and the two four pin case fan power headers. The board is complete with two PCIE 16X slots, but if both have cards in them at the same time, one is limited to only 4X speeds while the other keeps 16X. It’s also nice to see that the board still features regular PCI slots, as many people still have PCI devices they want to use in their new systems.
The red button featured above (right-most image) is a CMOS reset button, allowing you to reset your system back to normal after those frequent failed overclocking attempts. Directly to the right of the CMOS reset button is MSI’s new LED based debug system. Although it is nicer than MSI’s traditional D-bracket debug system that needed to be housed in a PCI slot, we encountered some problems with the system while working with the board. One was during a botched heatsink install that didn’t make correct contact with the X6800 CPU and therefore the CPU reached its top internal temperature and shut down. During this, the debug codes kept saying it was a memory problem, so I kept switching memory out over and over again to see if the board was highly incompatible with the high end memory on the market. I also had a problem with the diagnostic LED’s being so bright that actually figuring out the sequence of colors in the debug system required some additional work. |
| BIOS and Overclocking | ||||||||
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Like in most other MSI motherboards, the company is using a modified AMI BIOS for their P35 Platinum motherboard.
The BIOS itself is impressive and reflects much of the customizability that we typically see in extremely high end boards. However, a missing feature many power users (even those on a budget) ask for is the ability to specify maximum temperatures and voltages the board can reach before it will automatically be shut down. Other than that, the PC Health Status section gives you the standard temperature, fan speed, and voltages you would expect in any modern motherboard.
The Cell Menu is where the overclocking of the CPU takes place, and MSI includes a D.O.T. control mechanism, which allows for an easy, percentage based overclocking of your CPU, the PCIe interface, or both. Because we’re using an Extreme Edition CPU, we can also change the multiplier on our X6800 for a high FSB overclock within the Cell menu, but more on that just a little later.
And finally as you can see from above, the customizability is also evident in the DRAM timing section of the BIOS, allowing you to customize your memory for the timings that you desire.
As for overclocking the board, we used a 7X multiplier and gradually cranked up the board’s front side bus and voltages. Our highest stable overclock that got us into windows and through a series of 3DMark06 loops was 475MHz, ending up at a final clock speed of 3.325GHz. These initial results aren’t spectacular, but definitely show that the P35 and Bearlake family in general have some serious overclocking headroom under their hoods. |
| Test Systems and SANDRA | ||||||||
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In our synthetic CPU and Memory tests, we see that the P35 Platinum is able to keep up with the nForce 680i SLI in all four of our tests, but although it kept up with the EVGA board, it didn't clearly beat it in any tests. |
| 3DMark06 and PCMark05 | ||||
In our 3DMark06 CPU test, we actually see the MSI P35 Platinum barely edge out the EVGA 680i SLI board, with the EVGA board taking teh top spot in the rest of the benchmarks. |
| Half Life 2 and F.E.A.R. | ||||||||
Our Half Life 2 tests once again show the EVGA nForce 680i SLI board on top by a slight margin.
But unlike what we saw in Half-Life 2, the MSI P35 Platinum beat out the 680i board by a slim margin in our FEAR tests. |
| Cinebench 95 and WME9 + WinRAR MT | ||||||||
In our multitasking tests, we see that the EVGA 680i SLI once again is fastest, by five seconds when both boards are on a 1066MHz bus and by 3 seconds when they are at 1333MHz.
Cinebench has long been a very popular rendering benchmark based on Maxon's Cinema 4D rendering software, and in Cinebench 9.5, we see the 680i SLI render Cinebench's scene one second faster than the P35. |
| 3D Studio MAX 8 SP2 | ||||
Our 3D Studio Max 8 SP2 3D Model renders once again continue to show the P35 and 680i neck to neck when we render to a HD (1920x1200) resolution. Our hair01.max tests are only single threaded, and in that test, we saw the 680i finish the render two seconds faster than the P35. |
| Our Conclusion | ||||
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Three years ago, Intel launched the 925X / 915 chipsets and were criticized by some for introducing some new technologies before the market demanded them. This time around, however, with the launch of Bearlake, Intel has scored some points. The P35 chipset brings with it a handful of new technologies, like official 1333MHz bus speed support and DDR3 to just name a few. But unlike 925X and 915G, P35 comes in both DDR2 and DDR3 flavors, making the platform all the more attractive to price sensitive end users looking to save a bit on their memory expenditures.
Not only does the MSI P35 Platinum, which is one of the first Intel P35 motherboards on the market, have an excellent feature set, it also showed that it has the raw horsepower to keep up with the EVGA nForce 680i SLI and in some cases, we even saw the MSI P35 Platinum outperform the 680i SLI, albeit by very small margins. It’s also nice to see that MSI is once again trying to implement new and interesting ideas like their ‘roller coaster style’ motherboard heat pipe cooling technology. Not only does it look cool, it even stays relatively cool to the touch without a fan due to its effective heat dissipation. The BIOS was also generally good, with a large number of customizable features that allow for some decent overclockability. The only issues with the board that came up during the review process were the inaccuracy of the motherboards debugger and the fact that it was quite difficult to read. The board also only has four SATA ports, which because of today’s dirt-cheap hard drive market and more common SATA optical drives, may not be enough for even a motherboard targeted toward the more mainstream computer builder. But overall, the MSI P35 Platinum is a solid motherboard. It is a solid performer, has good features and is overall, pretty well rounded. If you’re looking for a new motherboard for your next Intel Core 2 system and want the latest motherboard technology at a reasonable price, the MSI P35 Platinum is definitely a product to consider.
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