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?
Comparisons aside though, the P35 Platinum does boast a healthy range of features, and one in particular that got my attention was the layout of the rear I/O panel, which has 4 USB ports nicely spread out from each other, so there’s actually room to plug in cables and devices that are slightly larger than standard. Other than that the I/O panel contains all the usual connections, including audio connections for 8-channel high definition audio along with a digital optical output. 2 x eSATA ports are included as standard, as well as a gigabit LAN connection and a Firewire400 port tucked away in there also. Lastly there’s a PS/2 connection for both the keyboard and the mouse, which doesn’t sound very notable, but a few manufacturers are starting to do away with these now.
The P35 Platinum has support for the new 45nm Wolfdale and Yorkfield CPUs from Intel, as well as native support for the current range of 1333MHz front-side-bus CPUs, so this board will run just about any LGA775 CPU, except for the old 533Mhz FSB models.
The P35 chipset has support for DDR2 RAM speeds of 667 or 800MHz, though the P35 Platinum lists support for speeds of 1066MHz which is done by an overclock of the chipset and MSI warns that the system may not be stable when running at these speeds. And they’re right. When doing the performance tests for this review (which we’ll get to later) we attempted to run the tests with the memory clocked at 1066MHz in addition to normal 800MHz, however the system wouldn’t boot into Windows once the speed was put at 1066MHz. After fiddling with BIOS settings for a little while we managed to get it to boot but it would freeze shortly after, and certainly wasn’t stable enough to complete any benchmarks. This is with the same RAM/hardware that was used with the ASUS P5KR we tested last week which ran perfectly at 1066MHz with no messing around required at all.
The P35 Platinum supports ATI’s CrossFire technology with its two PCI-Express x16 ports, well only one is actually an x16 slot, the other is an Express Lite slot which only supports speeds of x4 or x1 even when in CrossFire mode. The retention clips on the x16 slots are quite interesting, however in this case I’d choose the term ‘useless’, as it’s far more appropriate. The video card will slide into them and they will clip onto the card as they’re designed to do, but they offer almost no resistance when you go to remove the card, meaning they really do nothing to hold the card in place. Unlike other clips on other motherboards where you need one hand to undo the clip while your other hand pulls the card out, this isn’t required at all for the P35 Platinum and I wouldn’t be surprised to see cards coming loose in transit with systems built with these boards.
Now we move onto one of the more interesting parts of the motherboard, the cooling system. The P35 Platinum doesn’t use any fans on the motherboard to cool its chipsets, and while this isn’t uncommon these days, the system they’ve employed to cool them is a little bit out there. There’s a system of heat pipes connecting the Southbridge, Northbridge and power regulators next to the CPU to each other to spread around the heat, however the pipes and heatsinks look more like a rollercoaster from an amusement park, complete with a double loop-the-loop.
While the heatpipe cooling system works well (how could it not with this much cooling?) it does get in the way a little bit, the 8-Pin ATX12V power connector pops up from in between 3 heatpipes and requires an extension adapter to allow the user to plug in their power cable. Something else that seems like an afterthought is that just above the Southbridge a heatpipe has to make a detour around a mounting point, so it doesn’t just run straight over it, it just looks like they noticed it at the last minute and simply did a dodgy work-around. This whole cooling system could have been done much simpler, but then it wouldn’t have looked as cool or unique.
The P35 Platinum now has all solid-type capacitors, which is a great decision from MSI, as I’ve seen more MSI boards built with the old type of capacitors that had blown or leaked than almost all other brands put together, so this should definitely help with the long-term reliability factor.
When you first power on the P35 Platinum, there’s a number of rather high-intensity LEDs in the bottom corner of the motherboard below the Southbridge chip, 4 of which are used as diagnostic LEDs. These are the green ones you can see in the picture below, and they alternate with a red LED directly next to them depending on what part of the boot sequence the board has gotten up to. MSI has been using diagnostic LEDs for years, but these ones just look so much better than their old versions.
Next we see how the P35 Platinum performs...
Performance:
We’re going to be testing the P35 Platinum using our normal OzHardware test suite, which includes PCMark05, 3DMark06, SiSoft Sanda CPU Tests as well as the game Prey. We will be comparing the MSI P35 Platinum to our OzHardware test board - the ASUS P5N32-E SLI with the nVidia nForce 680i chipset, as well as the ASUS P5KR motherboard, with the same Intel P35 chipset as the P35 Platinum.
We wanted to test the MSI P35 Platinum board in two modes, one running the memory at the standard 800MHz, and the other with the memory running at 1066MHz, which MSI state is supported by the board (though not by the chipset, so it’s actually an overclock). When we tried to run the memory at 1066MHz Windows XP would constantly blue screen and crash on startup. After fiddling with the timing and voltages a bit, we managed to get it to boot in all the way, but it would always crash soon after, so we abandoned the idea altogether and ran the tests in 800MHz mode only. Both other boards had their tests run with the memory at 800MHz.
The Test Setup:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
- ASUS P5N32-E SLI, ASUS P5KR, MSI P35 Platinum Motherboards
- Corsair TWIN2X 2GB PC2-8500 1066MHz Memory Kit (2 x 1GB) (@800MHz only)
- XFX GeForce 8800GTS 320MB PCI-Ex16 Video Card
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA-II Hard Drive
- Antec Basiq 500W ATX Power Supply
- Windows XP Pro SP2
Read on for the results...
PCMark05:
For PCMark05, all of the tests were run on default settings and each board was run twice with the final result being the average of the two runs.
We have a surprisingly good result for the MSI P35 Platinum here, beating out both of the other boards with its final PCMark result. There was no one area where the P35 Platinum excelled, but rather it gave a very slight yet consistent improvement across the whole range of tests. Considering it runs the exact same chipset as the ASUS P5KR I wasn’t expecting to see much of a difference between the two, if any at all.
Next: 3DMark06
As with the PCMark tests, the 3DMark tests were all run on default settings and run twice for each board for consistency.
In a contrast of the PCMark05 results, we see the P35 Platinum lagging behind the other two boards. As the CPU, video card and memory are all the same, there was really only a small difference in the results, with the P35 Platinum losing most of its marks against the other two in the SM2.0 tests, which are the first two game tests. The drop was very small, only about 0.3fps for each test, but in the end slower is slower.
Next: Prey
For our Prey benchmarks, we ran through a number of resolutions with the game set to normal video settings, as well as 4x Anti-Aliasing. All resolutions and settings were each run twice for consistency.
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The results above are so close to identical that it really makes no difference either way. If anything the MSI P35 Platinum has come out ever so slightly on top in a couple of the tests. It’s actually good to see different motherboards and even different chipsets having such consistent performance against each other.
Next: SiSoft Sandra
The SiSoft Sandra tests we’re going to be doing will focus on CPU and Memory performance to see if we can try and differentiate these boards from each other a bit more.
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From the CPU tests above, we see a consistent pattern with the ASUS P5KR being Number 1, the MSI P35 in the middle and the nForce motherboard taking up place at the back of the field. Although there isn’t a big difference between the boards, they are at least giving consistent results in the CPU tests, with both P35 chipset motherboards leading the charge.
The memory bandwidth test gives a surprising result. All of these boards have the same RAM running at the same speed and two of these boards even have the same memory controller, and yet the MSI P35 Platinum still manages to pull away from the pack in a bad way and give a rather disappointing result compared to the other two. The nForce 680i based motherboard is the clear winner when it comes to memory bandwidth in this case.
The last test measures the CPU’s cache and memory subsystems, and both P35 based motherboards are quite a way in front, helping to explain why the nForce board came last in our previous CPU tests shown further up the page. The ASUS P5KR still comes out in front with the MSI P35 Platinum falling right in the middle of the other two models.
Conclusion:
The MSI P35 Platinum is a reasonably well featured motherboard, with lots of connectivity included as standard and plenty of expansion capability which is great for the enthusiast market. The very funky chipset cooling solution and high-intensity status LEDs give the P35 Platinum a certain amount off ‘show-off’ factor and as such will be great for people with window panels or modded cases who like to show off the guts of their systems.
Despite the funky cooling setting, from our experience it’s not going to be an overclocker’s dream, with it falling over in a screaming heap when simply trying to raise the memory speed to a supposedly (semi)supported level.
In the end, despite all of the P35 Platinum’s features, it is let down by its price which is around AU$60 more than the very similar ASUS P5KR motherboard, and with the ASUS motherboard you get a product that’s made in Taiwan, instead of one which is made in China from MSI, and generally boards made in Taiwan, have an air of quality over their Chinese made counterparts. It may be a generalisation but it generally proves to be true.
Sad to say but I think there are much better products out there than the MSI P35 Platinum, that are built better, have the same or better features, for less money.
OzHardware Rating – 5.5/10
This product can be purchased online at www.techbuy.com.au (Direct Link)
