MSI P965 Platinum Review - PAGE 1William Henning, Geordan Hankinson, Tom Karpik - Friday, November 17th, 2006
Introduction
Core 2 Duo has brought upon us a massive influx of motherboards all vying to hold together your fancy new Core 2 PC. Despite these many options however, there are only a handful of chipsets being employed by motherboard manufacturers in all Core 2 supporting motherboards. We've both P965 and 975X based boards and found them to be excellent products. We also looked at MSI's own 975X Platinum which was a fair contender against competitors. Today we are reviewing their more budget oriented P965 flavoured board for Core 2 Duo.
The MSI P965 Platinum, as you may imagine, uses the 965 chipset from Intel and has full support for Core 2 processors as well as a number of other important features. While 965 based chipsets don't feature full bandwidth Crossfire as their 975X counterparts do (we'll get into this on the next page), they are able to reach higher FSB speeds for overclocking chips with lower multipliers. Our full review will take a look at all the aspects of this board including its overclocking performance so keep reading!
First however, comes a brief look at the spec sheet for the P965 Platinum.
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Supports Socket 775 for Intel Core2 Extreme, Core2 Duo, Pentium 4 (Prescott, P4EE), Pentium D, Pentium XE/Celeron D processors in LGA 775 package |
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Supports FSB 533/800/1066 MHz |
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Supoprts Intel 05B/05A and 04B/04A processors |
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Supoprts EIST techonology |
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Supports Intel Hyper-Threading (HT) Technology |
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Supports Intel Dual Core Technology to 1066MHz and up |
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Chipset |
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| Intel® P965 Chipset |
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Supports FSB 533MHz, 800MHz & 1066MHz |
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Support Dual channel DDR2 533/667/800 memory interface up to 8GB (with DDR2 800, memory only up to 4GB) |
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Support Dual PCI Express 16X interface with either 1x16 or 1x4 operation. |
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| Intel® ICH8R Chipset |
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Integrated Hi-Speed USB 2.0 controller, 480Mb/sec, 8 ports |
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6 Serial ATAII ports w/ transfer rate up to 3Gb/s and support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 |
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PCI Master v 2.3, I/O ACPI 2.0 Compliant |
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Integrated AHCI controller |
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FSB |
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Support FSB 533 MHz, 800MHz & 1066MHz |
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Main Memory |
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Supports 4 unbuffered DIMM of 1.8 Volt DDR2 SDRAM |
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Supports up to 8GB memory size (with DDR2 800, memory only up to 4GB) |
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Support Dual Channel DDR2 533/677/800MHz and up |
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Due to the High Performance Memory design, motherboards or system configurations may or may not operate smoothly at the JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) standard settings (BIOS Default on the motherboard) such as DDR2 voltage, memory speeds and memory timing. Please confirm and adjust your memory setting in the BIOS accordingly for better system stability.
Example: Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 PC6400 operates at 2.0V, 4-4-4-12.
For more information about specification of high performance memory modules, please check with your Memory Manufactures for more details. |
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Slots |
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Two PCI Express 16X slots with 1x16 and 1x4 operations (PCI Express Bus SPEC V1.0a compliant) |
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Two PCI Express 1X slot |
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Two PCI 2.3 32-bit Master PCI Bus slots. (support 3.3v/5v PCI bus interface) |
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On-Board IDE |
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| One Ultra DMA 66/100/133 IDE controller integrated in JMicron JMB361 |
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Supports PIO, Bus Master operation modes |
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Can connect up to 2 Ultra ATA 133 drives |
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| Serial ATAII controller integrated in ICH8R and JMicron JMB361 |
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Up to 300MB/s transfer speed |
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Can connect up to 7 Serial ATA II drives (6 drives from ICH8R, 1 drive from JMB361) |
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Supports ACHI controller with SATAII RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 (ICH8R) |
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Supports SATAII hot plug |
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On-Board Peripherals |
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1 floppy port supports 1 FDD with 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M and 2.88Mbytes |
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1 Serial port (COM A) |
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1 parallel port supports SPP/EPP/ECP mode |
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8 USB 2.0 ports (Rear x 4/** Front x 4)(** Front USB ports are supported by pin-out) |
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1 6-in-1 audio jack (S/SPDIF out) |
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2 PS/2 connectors |
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2 IEEE 1394 (Rear x 1/ **Front x 1) (** Front 1394 port supported by pin-out) |
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1 LAN RJ45 connector |
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Audio |
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| High Definition link controller integrated in Intel ICH8R chip |
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Audio codec Realtek 883 |
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Compliance with Azalia 1.0 spec |
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Flexible 8 Ch. audio with jack sensing |
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LAN |
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Realtek RTL8111B PCI-Express Gb LAN Controller |
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IEEE 1394 |
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| VIA 6308P chipset |
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Supports up to two 1394 ports (Rear panel x1, front x2) |
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Transfer rate is up to 400Mbps |
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BIOS |
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The mainboard BIOS provides "Plug & Play" BIOS which detects the peripheral devices and expansion cards of the board automatically. |
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The mainboard provides a Desktop Management Interface(DMI) function which records your mainboard specifications. |
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Dimensions |
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12in.(L) x 9.65in.(W) ATX Form Factor |
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Mounting |
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9 mounting holes |
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