MSI P45 Platinum Motherboard

[Edmund]

Introduction

A few months back, Intel released the P45 Chipset -- at the time it was considered to be their mainstream offering, playing second fiddle to the X48 Express. With official support of a 1333MHz FSB, PCI-E 2.0, ATI CrossFire, and support for both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, there's a lot of roads to go down with the construction of one of these boards, and MSI went down all of them. MSI fleshed out a complete top-to-bottom assortment of boards, which means that they have a P45 motherboard that suits just about every potential buyer's needs. The P45 Platinum is the top end of their food chain, and we'll be taking a look at it today.

Evolution of P35 Express chipset

As the name suggests the MSI P45 Platinum is based on the new Intel P45 chipset. The P45 chipset, codenamed Eaglelake, is the successor to the P35 chipset, also known as Bearlake. The P45 chipset was developed to support the latest Penryn processors where high FSBs are required.

P35 has a total of 20 lanes of PCI Express Gen 1 with 16 lanes for the main graphics card. Add a second ATi card in CrossFire and it gets a mere four lanes of PCI Express, while adding insult to injury any PCI Express expansion slots on the board are disabled.

In essence, then, P35 is only intended to offer support for a single graphics card, but with P45 the graphics support is far more sensible. You still get 20 lanes of PCI Express but it is Gen 2, with double the bandwidth that operates with 16 lanes for a single graphics card or dual x8 if you're using CrossFire. There are a number of vendors offering X2 graphics cards with two Radeon GPUs on a single graphics card, so it is perfectly possible to install four GPUs in two graphics slots to achieve CrossFire X on the P45 chipset.

This is a useful change, but it's under the surface with the result that the P45 Platinum looks very similar to the P35 Platinum. Indeed, the only discernible visual difference on the P45 Platinum is the Circu-Pipe 2 cooling system, which has been heavily revised from the original Circu-Pipe that we saw on the X38 Diamond and X48 Platinum models.

[Edmund]

MSI P45 Platinum Motherboard

The P45 Platinum ships in a grey box with a World of Warcraft inspired creature drawn on the cover clearly promoting this board as a gamer's choice. CPU Support is identical although the memory has been upgraded to list official support for up to 8GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 (with unofficial support up to 1600 MHz).

DrMOS and Greenpower technologies are also highlighted and further defined on the back. DrMOS, short for Integrated Driver-MOSFET, refers to low power loss MOSFET's used on these P45 boards that MSI claims helps them operate at a level of power efficiency up to 93.1%. In a similar vein, Greenpower is an attempt at lowering power consumption by shutting down components, but only in junction with the Greenpower Genie (an optional component).

An array of cables and brackets comes bundled with this motherboard. Red, rounded IDE and floppy cables provide connections for older drive types, with SATA power cables and data cables making up the rest. As there are six SATA connectors on board, MSI should have gone the extra distance to get two more cables into the Platinum package. External USB and Firewire ports come on a single bracket, as well as a CrossFire link cable, a labeled I/O shield, and the M-Connector - a ease-of-use adapter similar in name and function to ASUS' Q-Connector. Separate discs with Vista and XP drivers as well as a HDD Backup disc provide the necessary installation software to be used with the manual. The media in the bundle remains mostly the same, with the inclusion of a disc of X-Fi drivers made specifically for the onboard chip found on MSI's motherboards. Downloading a set of drivers from Creative's website simply will not do here.

MSI also introduces the Rapidboost feature which is an interesting feature to be sure. When Rapidboost is enabled there are two modes to select from. Mode 1 actually leaves all the hardware at the default settings and doesn't actually overclock to the full OC settings until the operating system is loaded. Mode 2 overclocks the system to 50% of the overclock settings specified in the BIOS and brings the overclock to 100% once the system loads the operating system. The theory behind the feature is that most of the crashes or hang ups are encountered during the POST sequence. The P45 Platinum is equipped with a hardware OC jumper. Essentially it does what some of the pin/pad mods for Intel processors have done in the past. A 200MHz FSB processor can go to 266MHz, 266MHz becomes 333MHz and a 333MHz FSB processor can be taken to 400MHz FSB. It is certainly a nice feature.

The P45 Platinum supports Core 2 Duo / Quad / Extreme CPUs with up to an unofficial 1600 MHz front side bus. It also supports up to 16GB of DDR2 memory, running as high as 1200 MHz (overclocked). While 32-bit OS users won't benefit from the extra memory, 64-bit users should be able to see some benefits from this added feature. Unlike the higher-end X48 chipset, the P45s comes with a brand new Southbridge, the Intel ICH10/R.

[Edmund]

Performance

In PCMark, the scores produced look promising. The board’s CPU score of 9,648 was higher than any of the boards tested this month, two of which were nForce 790i boards. Next, it had a memory score of 6,371 while graphics was 13,256. Lastly, the HDD test generated a figure of 6,417. Overall, the P45 Platinum achieved a PCMark score of 10,063.

With increased FSB and technology that improves overclocking potential, the heroic duo gives overclockers an alternative to over-priced enthusiast platforms. Still, its performance is almost at par with the likes of the nForce 790i, and if you’re not itching so much for triple-SLI and prefer lower cost, the P45 Platinum is your best bet.

Pros and Cons

The P45 Platinum is very cheaper, but by its performance you wouldn't guess that. temperatures lower than previous generation MSI motherboards.

Pros:

• Copper heatpipes culminating in a work of art for a cooler
• Uses inexpensive DDR2
• Good overclocker

Cons:

• Hardware-OC jumpers (in 2008?)
• CrossFire kicks back to x8 for each card
• Some minor layout issues

[Miyamoto]

Specifications

• CPU
  
  • Supports Intel Core 2 Extreme/Core 2 Quad/Core 2 Duo based processors in LGA775 package.
  • Supports Intel Yorkfield, Wolfdale in the LGA775 package.
  • Supports FSB 1600 (OC)/1333/1066/800 MHz.
  • Support VRD 11.1 standard.
  
  
• Chipset
  
  • Intel P45 Chipset
    
    • Supports FSB 800/1066/1333/1600 (OC) MHz.
  • Intel ICH10R Chipset
    
    • Hi-Speed USB (USB2.0) controller, 480Mb/sec, up to 12 ports.
    • 6 SATAII ports with transfer rate up to 3Gb/s.
    • PCI Master v2.3, I/O APIC.
    • ACPI 2.0 compliant.
    • Serial ATA RAID 0/1/5/10.
    • Integrated AHCI controller.
  
  
• Main Memory
  
  • Supports four unbuffered DIMM of 1.8 Volt DDR2 800/1066 (OC)/1200 (OC) SDRAM, 16GB Max
• Slots
  
  • Two PCI Express x16 slots (PCI Express Bus SPEC V2.0 compliant; supports CrossFire Technology)
    
    • When using two PCIE x16 slots, the PCIE x16 lanes will auto arrange from x16/ x0 to x8 x8.
  • Two PCI Express x1 slots. (support PCI Express Bus specification v1.0a compliant)
  • Two 32-bit v2.3 master PCI bus slots.
    
    • Support 3.3v/5v PCI bus interface.
• On-Board IDE/SATA
  
  • One Ultra DMA 66/100/133 IDE controller integrated in JMicron® 363.
    
    • Supports PIO, Bus Master operation modes.
    • Can connect up to two Ultra ATA drives.
  • SATAII controller integrated in ICH10R/JMicron® 363 chipest
    
    • Up to 3Gb/s transfer speed.
    • Supports six SATAII ports by ICH10R
    • Supports two SATAII ports by JMicron 363, support SATA RAID 0/1/JBOD.
    • Supports one eSATA port by JMicron 362.
    • Supports AHCI controller with SATA RAID 0/1/5/10 by ICH10R.
• Audio
  
  • Chipset integrated by Realtek® ALC888/888T
    
    • Flexible 8-channel audio with jack sensing
    • Compliant with Azalia 1.0 Spec
    • Meet Microsoft Vista Premium spce
    • Supports VoIP Card (for ALC888T only)
• LAN: Supports PCI Express LAN 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet by Realtek 8111C.
• IEEE1394 / FireWire
  JMicron® 381 chipset:
  
  • Supports up to two 1394 ports. (Rear panel x1, pinheader x1)
  • Transfer rate is up to 400Mbps.
• Internal I/O Connectors
  
  • ATX 24-Pin power connector
  • 8-pin ATX 12V power connector
  • 4-pin ATX 12V VGA connector
  • CPU / System x 5 FAN connectors
  • CD-in connector
  • Front panel audio connector
  • Front panel connector
  • 1 x chasis intrusion connector
  • 1 x serial port pinheader
  • 3 x USB 2.0 connectors
  • 1 x Floppy disk drive connector
  • 8 x Serial ATAII connectors
  • 1 x ATA133 connector
  • SPDIF-Out connector
  • Clear CMOS Jumper
  • 1 x IEEE1394 connector support additional 1 port (optional)
  • 2 x HW-OC FSB jumpers
  • 1 x GreenPower Genie connector (optional)
  • 1 x Reset Button
  • 1 x Power Button
  • 1 x TPM module connector (optional)
• Back Panel I/O Ports
  
  • 1 x Clear CMOS button
  • 1 x PS/2 Keyboard
  • 1 x PS/2 Mouse
  • 1 x eSATA port
  • 1 x IEEE1394 port (optional)
  • 6 x USB 2.0 ports
  • 1 x RJ45 LAN Jack
  • 1 x 6 in 1 audio jack
  • 1 x Optical SPDIF-out
• BIOS
  
  • The mainboard BIOS provides "Plug & Play" BIOS which detects the peripheral devices and expansion cards of the board automatically.
  • The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface(DMI) function which records your mainboard specifications.
• Dimension: 30.5cm(L) x 24.5cm(W) ATX Form Factor