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Overclocking

So how did the MSI 965P Platinum do when it came to overclocking?  The Cell Menu in the BIOS was so nice I had high hopes for overclocking, but take a look for yourself in our results and you'll see that the actual attainable clock speeds are not quite up to par.  Basically, the MSI P965 Platinum ended up not living up to what we've come to expect from the P965 chipset.  Maybe we've been spoiled, but Gigabyte's 965P-DQ6 and Asus' P5B Deluxe boards, both P965 based, turned out really respectable overclocked results.  The P5B maxed out at 380MHz FSB for us, though later BIOS revisions have reportedly increased its headroom some more.  The DQ6 of course consistently gets above 400MHz FSB in all reviews around the net (we hit 415MHz ourselves) and has become one of the most impressive overclockers ever made.

In the case of the MSI P965 it managed 366MHz FSB, and we put every effort, plied every trick to maximize what we could achieve.  I'm not ruling out the possibility that a future BIOS update will loosen up the headroom, just as Asus has managed to MANY times, but at this point the headroom we found was limited at 366Mhz.

Dead last at WinRAR.

Last at Sandra.

Last at RightMark Reads.

Last at RightMark Writes.

Last at Latency.

Surprisingly, middle of the pack for bandwidth.

2.93GHz with our E6400 on this board, running at a 366MHz FSB is still a 30% overclock, but this is far below what we are able to achieve on some other boards, so while in pre-Core 2 days a 30% overclock would be quite decent, it is decidedly lackluster these days.

Reaching a stable overclock with a 366FSB on the MSI 965P Platinum required the following settings:

• set the Vcore offset to "0.20V"
• set the DDR2 voltage to 2.3V
• set the 965P voltage to 1.56V
• set the ICH voltage to 1.45V
• set the DDR2 timing to 4-4-4-12 @ 732MHz
• set the FSB speed to 366MHz
• used the outstanding Noctua heatsink with two 63CFM 12cm fans in a push-pull configuration

What was even more disappointing is that sometimes when rebooting an overclocked chip the board would just hang - and it would also hang sometimes when the CMOS settings were changed and a warm reboot was attempted. Mind you, the system always came up after a cold start - but I suspect MSI's engineers have some more BIOS tweaking to do.

I am pretty sure a better BIOS would do wonders for this board.

Conclusion

My initial impression of the board - other than the DIMM socket coloring - was highly favorable.  The MSI P965 Platinum has a nice clean layout, was easy to install, is completely passively cooled, and had an excellent BIOS featuring MSI's "Cell Menu" for overclockers.  Performance at stock speeds is also quite impressive. Considering the P965 is the "poor man's 975X" this board was pretty much neck to neck against the more expensive boards we tested.

The picture changed when I started overclocking. Everything was smooth at 300MHz... at 333MHz (even at stock voltages!) - but then I had to start increasing Vcore, and more importantly, the NorthBridge voltage. Even then, sometimes the board would not restart after I modified BIOS parameters. After a fair bit of work, I got the system stable at 2.93GHz - but it really did not want to go higher, and sometimes warm boots don't (boot).

So what does that mean?  Is it a nice board for running at stock, or minimal overclocks?

Yes.  And MSI would price this very competitively in this arena.

Does it have a nice feature set?

Absolutely.

Is it a great overclocker's board?

No.  In fact, it's overclocking headroom is sub-standard compared to the really aggressively capable P965 boards we've seen.

Would I get one?

For an office machine, non-enthusiasts machine, media center - sure.

For tweaking, no.

The funny thing is... I'm pretty sure that the board is capable of a lot more. I think that basically the non-tweakable timing parameters for the memory are largely to blame for the lackluster overclocking potential of the board - I base this on not having much luck running the memory faster than 833MHz on this board - memory I've been able to run at 1140MHz on some other boards.

This is a solid try from MSI, one I am sure they can improve on with more BIOS revisions.