The User Settings page is quite handy for those of you who like to live on the edge. When overclocking, nothing is really more frustrating than having to redo all your BIOS settings whenever the CMOS is reset. You can store profiles here and after a BIOS reset, you can reload your settings by coming to this page, provided you save some valid settings. You will still need to adjust system date and time manually though.

The Cell Menu page is the main area for all things performance related. You have extensive FSB options, manual or MSI's dynamic D.O.T. For those of you unfamiliar with this technology, what it does is depending on your CPU and PCIE load, the board will dynamically overclock the system to get the most out of it.

Options will range from 1% to 15%. Generally, even at 15%, there should be no stability issues as the OC is conservative, but this will all vary depending on the processor and cooling you use.

Memory options will vary depending on the ram used. You can choose to use the SPD settings or adjust the timings manually. As usual, the lower the values, the faster the performance at the expense of stability.

Test Setup

The MSI P7N SLI Platinum (labeled as MSI 750i in the charts) will be equipped with an Intel E6750 clocked at 2.66GHz. A Seagate Barracuda 1TB will handle the storage duties and a GeForce 8800GTX running ForceWare Release 169 for our video needs. Windows Vista Ultimate is the OS of choice, fully patched up to the time of testing.

The comparison motherboard will be the Gigabyte P35-DS3R and MSI P35 Combo. Both boards will be configured with Dominator DDR2, configured with each board's detected SPD settings for testing.

The software used is as follows:

- We ran the memory bandwidth benchmark.

- A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

- CDex v170b2 was used to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

- We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

DVD Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

- Photoshop is perhaps the defacto standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is so popular, we incorporated DriverHeaven's latest test into our review process. Lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars @ 640x480 and Crysis @ 800x600 at LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. Higher scores are better. We used Guru3D's Crysis benchmark tool and the for ETQW.

All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each platform. Despite the slight differences between the motherboards, we matched the tweaks as close as possible. The drivers otherwise were identical.

Sandra XII Memory

Both of the P35 boards are quicker than the MSI 750i. The benchmark is strictly synthetic though it does give us a gauge to look back on for the rest of the benchmarks.

PiFast

Very close results here. Again, both of the P35 boards come out ahead. The Gigabyte P35 wins this benchmark by about three quarters of a second over the MSI P7N.

CDeX

Like our PiFast test, the results are the same. Gigabyte's P35 leads the pack, one second faster than the MSI P35 Combo and three seconds faster than the MSI P7N.