Today we take a look at MSI's P45 Platinum - an Intel P45 based DDR2 board for enthusiasts.
The board is packed full of features - which is not unusual for an enthusiasts board - however it sports a very unusual looking heatpipe/heatsink arrangement.
As we would expect from a P45 based enthusiasts board, it supports processors all the way up to the current top of the line QX9770 - so if you have the funds available, you can put the latest & fastest Intel quad core processor into the board, as MSI has qualified the 136W TDP monster as being supported on the P45 Platinum.
In our first P45 review (the Asus P5Q Deluxe) we found that the BIOS made a huge difference to memory performance, and that the P45 seemed a bit slower for memory access than the P45. It will be interesting to see how the MSI P45 compares to it.
Specifications
| Socket |
775 |
| CPU (Max Support) |
Core 2 Extreme |
| FSB |
800/1066/1333/1600 |
| Chipset |
Intel® P45 |
| DDR2 Memory |
DDR2 800/1066/1200 |
| DDR3 Memory |
N/A |
| DIMM Slots |
4 |
| Max Memory (GB) |
16 |
| PCI-Ex16 |
2 |
| PCI-Ex8 |
N/A |
| PCI-Ex4 |
N/A |
| PCI-Ex1 |
2 |
| PCI |
2 |
| IDE |
1 |
| SATA |
8 |
| RAID |
0/1/5/10 |
| LAN |
10/100/1000*1 |
| TPM |
1(Optional) |
| USB ports (Rear) |
6 |
| Audio ports (Rear) |
6+Optical SPDIF |
| Serial ports (Rear) |
N/A |
| Parallel ports (Rear) |
N/A |
| 1394 ports (Rear) |
1(Optional) |
| eSATA |
1 |
| VGA |
N/A |
| DVI |
N/A |
| HDMI |
N/A |
| Form Factor |
ATX |
| DrMOS |
Y |
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