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Intel has done it again with their new P35 "Bearlake" chipset. It seems that we no sooner get accustomed to Intel's last chipset design, then they see fit to spring another one upon us. But from what's been seen of the P35 so far appears to be very promising. And of course, our friends at MSI have been working overtime to bring us their latest motherboard built for the Intel P35. The MSI P35 Platinum motherboard is the first in what is certain to be a long line of new and improved motherboard designs.

It's somewhat obvious that Intel has launched the P35 chipset to compete with the NVIDIA 650i chipset and its budget gaming power. Though the P35 Platinum does come with just one PCI-e 16x slot for graphics (one PCI-e 4x slot, two PCI-e 1x slots , and two old school PCI slots), that 1333 MHz FSB is quite the treat. And the jumper pin overclocking, allowing for FSB straps to 200, 266, and 333 MHz (though 333MHz times 4 is the stock P35 FSB speed), it is truly unique.

Now we've already reviewed a couple of P35 chipset contenders, with those being the Gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard, and the Asus P5K motherboard. The Gigabyte board was quit the performer, taking home either first or second place when rivaled in our motherboard benchmarking suites. It did have it's hands full competing with Intel P965 based motherboards, but the P965 chipset is a little more seasoned in terms of driver support and improved BIOS revisions. The Asus P5K on the other hand truned out to be pretty solid from the very start, and did hit some pretty high overclocks too.

So it would seem that Intel is trying to take top tier in both the CPU and chipset market. It will undoubtedly be interesting to see what MSI has done to take advantage of Intel P35 chipset.

We'll start by drifting over some of the greater benefits that both the Intel P35 chipset and the MSI P35 Platinum motherboard have to offer.