Huy's Two Cents

As we've pointed out earlier, Dynamic Overclocking Technology (D.O.T.) is featured on the MSI P35 Platinum Combo. As the systems loads up, the PC will dynamically overclock. For testing, we disabled this, but a quick run through as General allowed us to gain an additional 5% on average of performance. For some odd reason, Commander caused us some stability issues, despite manually adjusting the CPU voltage to try to stabilize the system.

Overclocking the old fashioned way was actually very easy, despite the E6750's 333MHz FSB. With little effort, we were able to reach 490Mhz on air. Granted, we've had to increase the voltages to the max for CPU and chipset, but this was impressive considering we were using air cooling. I was able to squeeze an extra 4MHz out of the Gigabyte board, but given in the past I've had some issues with overclocking MSI boards, I was quite pleased with the results. Before getting too excited though, I did run into some crashes after about an hour of repeated benchmarks, and had to knock the system back to 486MHz to run smoothly.

Stability throughout testing, save for the small hiccup while overclocking, was excellent. As I'll let Hubert explain shortly, the MSI P35 Platinum Combo worked super right out of the box. It's one of those rare things as we'll be talking about here in the near future, many products like to throw lefts when you're expecting a right.

The P35 chipset is intended for mainstream audiences, but the pricing is still relatively high right now, despite Intel's latest X48 hitting the market. The MSI P35 Platinum Combo is priced a little lower than other P35 boards, but it's not hovering in the $110 to $120 range as the P965 chipset did during its peak.

Despite the mainstream moniker, the P35 is a very capable chipset and boards such as the MSI P35 Platinum Combo are viable options for the majority of users, performance minded included. DDR2 performance was very impressive, and while DDR3 performance wasn't bad, those of you waiting for prices to drop can still make use of DDR2 in the meantime.

Hubert's Two Cents

As Huy alluded to, we've had some issues in the past when setting up test systems and most recently it was the first MSI P35 Platinum, non-Combo, we received last year. We were never able to get the system up and running, going through two boards and three different reviewers (Scott was also unable to get the board running). There were two possible causes though, which is not entirely MSI's fault. We believe the board had issues detecting the microcode on our X6800, though Scott used an entirely different CPU. A few sites had problems with Corsair ram, but again, Scott still had problems despite using totally different DDR2.

Fast forward to present day and we had absolutely no issues with using Corsair Dominator DDR2 modules, to an extent. Despite many boards supporting upwards of 1066MHz, the MSI P35 Platinum Combo simply would not POST at 1109Mhz. The next step down was 999Mhz, which worked like a charm.

We came away very impressed with the MSI P35 Platinum Combo and have no problems recommending it to our readers.

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