Related Articles

Overclocking

Overclocking the MSI P45 Platinum was a pain in the posterior.

Everything was fine until I tried to go over 450MHz FSB. It then became intensely painful, as most attempts would result in the board not posting - and even worse yet, not recovering, requiring that I clear the CMOS pretty much after every attempt.

I did find a newer BIOS on the MSI site, however the Windows based update utility does not find it, and the BIOS file is too large to fit on a floppy. This would not be a problem if the hard drive was formatted as a FAT drive, however our test drive is an NTFS drive; thus I have not yet been able to load the newer BIOS.

MSI really needs to add a BIOS based flash utility that can re-flash from a USB stick. Most XP and Vista installs use NTFS, so its not reasonable to require a FAT formatted hard drive and a boot floppy to re-flash when the on-line utility does not work with beta BIOS's.

A year ago, I'd have been amazed at a board that would run stably at 450x9 - however I've gotten spoiled by boards that can run stably with a 500-515MHz FSB (albeit with a lower multiplier).

I also find that there is something amiss with the memory performance - and by now I have to conclude that it is something to do with the P45 chipset's memory controller as I had similar memory performance issues with the Asus P5Q Deluxe that I recently reviewed.

Power Consumption

As you can see the MSI P45 Platinum idles at 90W at 3.16GHz, and goes all the way to 166W when loaded at 4.05GHz.

Conclusion

The MSI P45 Platinum is a fine board for most users - it is certainly choke full of features, and is overall a decent overclocker.

But I feel that the P45 Platinum desperately needs a BIOS update to allow it to overclock better, and increase the memory performance, in order to truly to capture enthusiasts hearts. I found it strange that I could not reliably run the memory at 1000-4-4-4-12 once I exceeded a certain processor speed; and I found it very worrisome that the readings from the H/W Monitor showed the processor Vcore being higher than I set it in the Cell menu.

If you don't need to tweak the last HZ out of your setup, an E8400 and an MSI P45 Platinum combined with a good cooler such as the Noctua 12 would probably let you run at 9x450MHz without too much difficulty - as long as you had some good memory that ran at 900-4-4-4-12.

With a good BIOS update, this board could easily become an enthusiasts' favorite - however even now it is quite a decent board.