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.

I/O Ports

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.

RAM Slots

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.

Expansion Slots

PCI-Ex16 Retention Clip

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