Related Articles

The Stuff

Before we look at the board, let's take a quick peek to see what it comes with.

We find:

• fold out "Quick Setup Guide"
• P35 Combo Series manual
• Warranty card
• XP drivers & utilities CD
• Vista drivers & utlities CD

The rest of the stuff:

• IDE cable
• two Molex to SATA power cable adapters
• easy jumper blocks
• four SATA2 cables
• a FireWire I/O panel cover
• back I/O panel insert
• two DDR2/DDR3 selection paddles

Here is a shot of the selection paddles in operation - MSI lights them up for us!

Guess what kind of memory I was using when I took this shot.

The Board

Ok, enough preliminaries. Let's take a peek at the motherboard:

Nice clean layout - and a LOT of DIMM slots!

I like how the two GPU slots are spaced out; the white slot is a a full PCIe 16x (v1.0) slots, whereas the yellow slot is electrically only a PCIe 4x slot - however past experience shows that a 4x slot is still good enough for CrossFire.

Here is a closer look at the slots:

Now if you are like me, you could not help but notice the funky "Roller Coaster" heatsink near the CPU socket. Personally, I am not crazy about it, but at least MSI's engineers were careful and left room for monster heatsinks like the Noctua-12 that we like to use.

Look at all the solid state caps near the CPU socket:

Below the CPU socket we have the six DIMM sockets:

Remember the DDR2/DDR3 selection paddles? You put them into sockets of the opposite type of the memory you are using - so if you are using DDR2, you put them into the DDR3 sockets; if you are using DDR3, you put them into DDR2 sockets. MSI uses the paddles to re-route the signals fromt he Northbridge to the appropriate pins on DDR2/DDR3 dimms.

The green and orange sockets are for DDR2 - and unfortunately MSI did not color code them by memory channel, so you'd better put one DDR2 stick in a green socket, and one in an orange!

The blue and pink sockets are for DDR3 modules.

Here we see the five on-board SATA2 connectors.

On the back panel we see the two eSATA connectors, along with:

• six USB 2.0 ports
• FireWire
• PS/2 keyboard and mouse
• Gigabit Ethernet

Ok, so we know the board has a nice clean design (and funky heatsinks) - but what is its BIOS like?