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The Board

The MSI P965 Platinum has a nice clean, understated layout.  The board uses completely passive heatsinks and we had no problems installing massive heatsinks and large 2 slot high end video cards.

As you can see below, there is a grouping of six SATA2 ports on the bottom left, with an IDE interface to their left, and a seventh SATA2 port above that. The white PCIe connector is a full PCIe 16x slot, with the yellow slot being electrically a PCIe 4x slot but taking 16x cards.

The bundle is pretty vanilla, but MSI includes four SATA2 cables, an ATA cable, two SATA2 power cables, a backpanel USB port etc.

The Quick Install guide, manual, registration form and driver CD round up the bundle.

Below you can see the strangely coloured memory slots - by strange I am referring to the fact that the colours are not paired by colour the same was as the standard for MANY other boards.  I *REALLY* wish MSI would have color coded the memory pairs instead of using a different color for each channel!

As you can see, the motherboard takes a four pin molex as well as a four or eight pin ATX power connector in addition to the main 24 pin power connector.

Passive chipset coolers and clean layout make the board very easy to install and work around.

The area around the processor is very clean and clear, I had no problem mounting an outsize heatsink.

The back I/O panel is well laid out, and gives us plenty of I/O - PS2 mouse and keyboard, parallel and serial port, SP/DIFF out, four USB 2.0, a firewire link, five audio connections and a TOS output. Oh - and a gigabit ethernet of course.