MSI P45 Platinum

Item: MSI P45 Platinum
Author: Richard Swinburne

Written by Richard Swinburne

June 20, 2008 | 08:21

Tags: #benchmarks #ddr2 #overclocking #p45 #performance #platinum #review

Companies: #intel #msi

Stability

Despite our initial complaints about the BIOS, once it's left to entirely do what it likes the board is really very stable. We set it up as usual and ran both a QX9650 with a 9800 GTX with both Prime95 torture test and 3DMark06 looping for 24 hours and found it was perfectly stable with the system still completely responsive.

CrossFire, however, was a different matter. Like the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 we looked at recently, we found that the board would fall over after just a short few hours of looping 3DMark with two Radeon HD 3870s thrown in, even with additional cooling over the graphics cards (although not the north bridge).

Unfortunately, as it still stands, we can't really recommended extended gaming sessions using a P45 board and ATI CrossFire – hopefully AMD will sort its drivers out and/or maybe future BIOS releases will help resolve this situation.

Overclocking

We attempted to overclock the MSI P45 Platinum, but given that our patience was already wearing thin after trying to apply just a few simple tweaks, it wasn't long before our patience wore out. Our initial attempts failed and the board refused to POST... we'd hit that annoying bug again and four letter words started spewing out. I'll leave you to decide what those words were, but let's just say they weren't particularly pleasant and Tim said his fragile mind was now damaged for life.

I guess we'll come back to it again once the UEFI BIOS is released and hopefully by then MSI will have a much better BIOS. For the time being though, given the stress just getting the board to work consistently well after applying just simple tweaks, we recommend a wait and see approach when it comes to overclocking the P45 Platinum.

Value and Conclusions

It's genuinely a real shame the BIOS is still so poor—even despite many revisions coming through from MSI—because I do like this board a lot for its lean, very precise approach to hardware use. It's not cluttered, or full of useless non-feature features. MSI manages to offer eight SATA without including an intrusive hardware RAID implementation; it also manages to deliver good power efficiency and regulation with just five CPU power phases and achieves some great results.

At £123, it's also attractively priced, although possibly still too expensive for some (you'll be looking at the ever popular Neo range then), but at least it's not sitting in the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6's £160 price range. It fits right by the Asus P5Q Deluxe which is bad for it because the Asus BIOS is about 11 times better on a scale of one to ten. It also features funky innovations like ExpressGate, and necessary features like EZFlash.

All I want is an in-BIOS flash utility for this board, or even an in-Windows one that works with Vista 64-bit! Having to fish around for software to make a USB memory key bootable because MSI doesn't provide any in BIOS flash utilities, is both unforgivable and exceedingly frustrating.

We love the look of the new heatpipes – they cool effectively and aren't too intrusive, but unfortunately that doesn't make a good motherboard. It's slower than the competition, it can't really be tweaked, and I can't say the overall experience has been a positive one. What was going to be part of a P45 launch review last month, has been left until last as we have spent a considerable number of days trying to get the most of out it. Sadly, it's lacking in too many areas. MSI has done a lot where it can to pull its socks up—this is obvious—but stacked up against the competition it still falls down.

We're half way there to Epic: a perfect example is the software: GreenPower Center is awesome, but CoreCenter is an epic fail.

Final Thoughts

All in all, the MSI P45 Platinum scores many wins with us, but unfortunately it hits almost as many epic fails. Hopefully some of these will change with software updates and BIOS updates, and we greatly look forward to what can be achieved with UEFI when the free update arrives in the next few months. Until then, we can only recommend you look elsewhere because there are currently better boards on the market.