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...
