MSI P45 Platinum

Board Layout

The general layout is really very good – we found no real issues at all. The memory slots are a touch close to the graphics card, but you can still get the modules in and out easy though, and the four pin Molex socket for additional PCI-Express power is the wrong side of the board but you don't really need to use it either.

Aesthetically it's really quite appealing too – the colours keep it simple to understand, yet more "grown up" than the Gigabyte for example, and thankfully this isn't a DDR3 board so there are no pink memory slots!

Carrying on with the good looks, the heatpipe array is a visual extravagance with pipes and fins popping up everywhere from the central north bridge; MSI was always good at this sort of thing having launched its loop-da-loop CircuPipe last year too. Despite the fact there are five pipes popping out the north bridge heatsink there's actually quite a lot of space around the CPU socket as the other heatsink fins are quite low slung too.


The entire board has solid aluminium capped capacitors from Nippon Chemicon for reliability, and both north bridge and memory get two phase power regulation from the usual sealed cored chokes and low profile PowerPAK MOSFETs. Things for the CPU are done a little differently though – here is where MSI's DrMOS branding comes into play.

Instead of the two MOSFETs and driver IC as three separate entities, MSI has included them in one single chip instead – this "makes them run cooler" and uses up far less board space. It also means MSI can reduce power regulation in just five phases, instead of claiming to need eight, ten, 12, 16 (and more) phases.These MOSFET types aren't unique to MSI though – they’re not patented and are made by a third party so it won't stop other companies from using them in the future.


Despite the fact the heatpipes were held down with just push-pins, the contact with the DrMOS were very good and the heatpipes remained quite cool to touch during testing.

In addition to all this, MSI has also included a power phase adjustment feature called GreenPower – this is like Asus' EPU and Gigabyte's DES. It adjusts both the CPU phases, as well as flicks between the single or double memory and north bridge phases to save as much power as possible. The phase use changes are consistently happening on a very fast basis—far more so than even Gigabyte changes phase count—and we found it was incredibly in tune with the load and therefore power requirements of the respective parts. In short, it worked really very well as you'll see later. There are blue LEDs included that show off the phase changes so you can see it happening in real time.


MSI has included a couple of "overclocking" jumpers to switch the north bridge frequency up a notch. It's old school, so that might be cool to some of you, but the fact it's buried under the graphics card and the fact we aren't in 1999 any more really doesn't sway this feature with us. In truth, we didn’t touch it at all.

The eight SATA should be plenty for most people; six of which are angled at 90 degrees to the PCB and include the SATA clip connectors too to make sure the cables don't accidentally fall out. The extra two are from a JMicron chipset that also provides the IDE port, however, quite frankly we'd much rather the Silicon Image chipsets that are used on the Asus and Gigabyte P45 boards.


Connectivity provisions are well stacked from two PCI-Express x16 slots – while both are blue, the darker of the two is the primary graphics slot; a nice touch. There are a couple of PCI and PCI-Express x1 slots included too for some basic expansion, although we're missing the third x4/x16 slot. Quite frankly though, this is rarely needed – instead, MSI has chosen to keep it simple and that works for us.

Finally the pin-outs are placed in easy to reach positions around the edges – the USB 2.0s are colour coded but still look very much like the front panel pin-outs that are right next to them, and there is even a simple power and reset button too. While we don't care too much for super-high quality swankypants backlit buttons, some extra identification between the two wouldn't go amiss.