The P35 Platinum is MSI’s top-range P35 based DDR2 motherboard, and today we’re going to take an in depth look into the boards
features (of which there are many) as well as how it performs compared to some of the big guns of the industry.
Having just completed a review of the ASUS P5KR last week, I am a bit taken back by the similarities I am finding on the MSI P35 Platinum. Yes I know they’re both based on the P35 chipset, but it goes further than that. The included features of the 2 boards are extremely similar, and yet the MSI version is almost AU$60 more expensive, so as ASUS boards aren’t generally the cheapest on the market, the question has to be asked of what this MSI board has to demand such a price premium, hopefully we’ll be able to shed some light through this review.
The P35 Platinum (aka – MS-7345) uses Intel’s P35 Northbridge chipset coupled with the older but more common DDR2 memory, so it will be ideally suited for people upgrading their old boards or building a system on a budget. Working alongside the P35 Northbridge is Intel’s ICH9R Southbridge chipset, and being that it is the ‘R’ version, we get RAID functionality on the included SATA ports (RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10), as well as eSATA ports, a dozen USB2.0 ports and built-in High Definition Audio codec.
So far it seems to have a lot of the basic features you’d want from a motherboard at the higher end of the market. The full specs of the P35 Platinum are listed below:
- LGA775 CPU Platform (Support for Core 2 Duo/Quad/Extreme, Pentium D, Pentium 4 CPUs)
- 800/1066/1333MHz CPU Front Side Bus Support
- Intel P35 Northbridge/iCH9R Southbridge Chipset
- DDR2 667/800/1066MHz Dual Channel Memory – 4 x Slots, 8GB Max Total (800Mhz max native support by chipset)
- 7 x SATA-II Ports (2 x External/eSATA) – 4 Internal + 2 eSATA from Southbridge, 1 from addtional Marvell Controller
- 12 x USB2.0 Ports (6 on Back Panel, 6 by header on motherboard)
- 2 x PS/2 Ports – Keyboard/Mouse
- 2 x PCI-Express x16 Slots (One Supports x16, other supports x4 or x1 modes) – Crossfire Compatible
- 2 x PCI-Express x1 Slots, 2 x PCI 2.3 Slots
- 2 x Firewire400 Ports (1 x Rear Panel, 1 x Motherboard header)
- 8-Channel Audio w. Optical S/PDIF output
- 1 x GigLAN Port
- 1 x ATA-133 Connector, 1 x FDD Connector, 1 x Serial Port Header, 5 x Aux Fan Connectors
- 12” x 9.6” ATX Form Factor
When you take a look at the specs listed above, you can see that they’re almost identical to the (significantly cheaper) ASUS P5KR motherboard with only a few minor differences, such as an Optical Audio out instead of a Coax Digital, an extra eSATA port, the inclusion of a PS/2 mouse port and a couple of extra fan headers, so again we must ask – why the big price difference?
