Thoughts, Awards and HEXUS.right2reply
Overclocking wise, we managed to push the CPU bus on the MSI to a heady 410MHz or so with perfect stability, giving most Core 2 Duo overclockers a decent headroom to explore should retail examples do the same. Combined with the generous voltage ranges available and adjustment over the common features and the board shouts pretty loud in that respect. Add the feature-rich nature of a P965 + ICH8R mainboard augmented with a Firewire controller and decent Ethernet and audio ICs and the P965 Platinum makes the right noises there as well.The layout sucks in places, but that's really all that's wrong. The BIOS was a pleasure to use and work with, stability was excellent -- it's just finished a 24 hour 3DMark + Stress Prime 2004 torture test, overclocked to ~3.2GHz (~290MHz CPU bus freq., memory at ~870MHz), as I type this -- and performance was great, besting the Bad Axe in a bunch of tests and keeping pace or beating the Gigabyte in the rest.
We can't comment on bundle, and we're sad we didn't test the MSI CoreCell software for tweaking in Windows, but we're sure MSI will supply the right amount of cabling for the board in the retail box and give you the right drivers on the CD (even if they're not on the website!), especially if their other Platinum SKUs are anything to go by.
Overall, we're impressed. It's as decent a P965 board as we've seen yet, MSI do The Right Thing� and give the user back an ATA port, and the rest of the package is certainly up to scratch. Given a price of £100-110, inc VAT, the board will represent good enough value to make it onto any potential consideration list you might have for a P965-based mainboard and Core 2 Duo.
HEXUS Awards
The MSI P965 Platinum gets our Gaming Speed award in recognition of its all-round performance and good overclocking.
MSI P965 Platinum
