Again, these are the standards for our motherboard reviews. There was one issue in particular with the memory during the initial system setup, but I'll save that little nightmare for the conclusion of my article. But who are we going to testing against?  

It's the clash of the Intel chipset titans! As these competing boards stand, the Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi was pretty decent, though it did pale somewhat when compared to the Gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard. But give them some time to refine the BIOS and or related drivers, that's when the P35 chipset will start to shine. The Asus P5B-E is a great board, and even won the distinctive Neoseeker Overclocker's Award. And finally, the MSI 975X Platinum may not have stood out in the digital crowd, but is a nice piece of hardware nevertheless.

So what can these Intel chipsets do with our collection of benchmarks?

But before we bust our way into benchmarking, there is one very important issue I should touch upon. It's with regards to the initial 1.0 BIOS that the MSI P35 Platinum motherboard had shipped with. To put it bluntly, it turned the P35 into a paper weight. It wasn't dead mind you, but just having complications with the Corsair PC-8500 memory modules we use for our motherboard testing. When the afore mentioned memory was installed, the system would hang endlessly, and those little POST code LED's would (in their colorful language) indicate a memory error.

I've seen problems like this before when a motherboard won't boot due to low memory voltages. I'll take a moment to detail the rather arduous process we went through (and it was a team effort) to get the MSI P35 Platinum running. Point form too, just to save some keystrokes and keep you from any of my profanities for the frustration.

It was a marathon of testing and re-testing to find something that would work, but as for it being the simple matter of a BIOS update, that wasn't surprising at all. I've encountered numerous motherboards that have the worst initial BIOS release, and most often the issue at hand has to do with memory module compatibility. Fortunately, by the second BIOS release most every problem is gone (usually thanks to hardware reviewers like us) who are able to worm out these little problems. Yep, we're pretty much Beta Testers.

But to get to the point, the 1.1 BIOS revision worked wonders for the MSI P35 Platinum, and I hope they start shipping with that 1.1 version BIOS flashed to the board. No one wants to have two or more sets of memory on hand to get  a motherboard running.

On final note before we get into the testing phase of this review; I (and other here) have been running into a lot of difficulty with RightMark Audio is recent months. The problem seems to be growing, and seems to be an issue with the current RealTek audio drivers. Unfortunately, I could not get RightMark Audio to give me any solid figures in time for this review (it came back every time complaining of errors during testing). As for such, there will be no RightMark Audio testing today.

Benchmarks, here we come!