MSI P45 Platinum

Testing

Testing motherboards is usually performed by running several synthetic and gaming benchmarks, and comparing the results from these to other boards to see which has the best performance. However, in most motherboard reviews, you’ll notice that performance wise, most motherboards are pretty much the same; mobos have very little effect on performance. With that in mind, this review features no testing, and instead has focused more on features and overclocking ability.

Overclocking

Overclocking with the MSI P45 Platinum can be as simple or as complicated as you like. I don’t profess to be an expert on overclocking, but I was able to take my Intel E6750 from it’s stock of 2.66GHZ to 3.6GHZ within minutes, simply by using the easy access voltage controls to up the power to the CPU and memory and raising the FSB.

After this, I lowered the CPU ratio multiplier to 6 (lowest possible) and raised the FSB gradually to find the max frequency the board could handle. At stock voltages, the max FSB I could achieve was 460. Raising the voltage on the northbridge enabled me to raise it to around 470. While this is pretty good, it’s nothing particularly special and means overclocking is limited somewhat. Without some serious tweaking, I doubt I could reach 4GHZ with my current CPU.

During testing, I discovered that one of the more user-friendly aspects of the P45 Platinum’s overclocking, is that if you OC enough to cause a failed post, the board will just reset the stock frequencies and boot you back to the BIOS to make adjustments. However, if you heavily exceed the maximum stable frequency, you will have to reset the CMOS like normal.

Cost

Cost wise, the the MSI P45 Platinum can be found at most e-tailers for £120, though at a couple it’s available for sub £100. While there are a couple of P45 boards from other manufacturers priced under this (around the £80 mark), most are priced well above this, between £130 and £150 making the P45 Platinum from MSI one of the better value P45 based boards around.

Motherboards