TMPGEnc

MSI takes this one, though it isn't the focus board of today. The MSI P35 takes the lead, followed by Gigabyte and the MSI P7N brings up the rear.

DVDShrink

The MSI P7N SLI Platinum finishes third here again. We're starting to see a trend with many of our benchmarks were disk IO plays a part. The results where the 750i falls a bit behind are consistent with some other reviews we've seen where the Nvidia IO subsystem isn't as efficient as Intel's.

Photoshop CS2

The same story we've seen all day.

Crysis

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Compared with the rest of the benchmarks, the has a very good showing in the gaming department. We were only able to display single GPU results as we were unable to secure a second card for SLI testing. Of course, at low resolutions, SLI is really kind of pointless, but there will be a positive impact when playing at higher resolutions.

Final Words

As with some of our recent MSI boards, overclocking the old fashioned way was actually very easy. With little effort, we were able to reach 484Mhz on air, slightly less than what we managed with the P35. Note that we said fairly solid. While no data was lost, we did experience lockups when hitting up some torrents running continuously and performing daily gaming tasks without reboots in between. There were 3 instances where when I checked the status of uTorrent, the window froze and the system required a reboot. When we clocked down to 478, we had no problems the latter days of testing.

We had a few instances of the system not posting during the overclocking tests (while looking for the right overclocking speed), but these were easily corrected with the CMOS reset button on the rear of the case. This is a huge time saver and is really convenient. As for the BIOS itself, we were quite satisfied, and the user settings page was another time saver. Those afraid to play with fire, MSI's Dynamic Overclocking Technology (D.O.T.) is present should the user wish to play with it. As the systems loads up, the PC will dynamically overclock.

At stock speeds, we have no complaints at all about the stability. Performance was good though in the benchmarks, it fell short on a few occasions. We felt the system was a good performer and in day-to-day use, we couldn't tell if the 750i was quicker or slower than the P35. The benchmarks say slower though, and for those of you interested in good performance, have no interest in SLI or who are either ATI video card loyal (the P35 generally supports CrossFire), the P35 has been shown to be slightly quicker here today.

The bundle is nothing to write home about, but that's the price we don't pay, hence the lower price when compared to other high-end offerings. From a storage front, the MSI P7N SLI Platinum should have most people covered, being able to handle up to six SATA drives and four IDE devices. The M-Connectors are a nice touch as it will make maintenance routines easier.

The 790i released recently is going to cost an arm and a leg, so there is a market for boards based on the 750i. We have established the is geared towards the mainstream user who may not have the money to purchase a super high-end motherboard and CPU combo. Of course the 750i supports Intel's entire CPU product line as of this writing, so the choice is yours. SLI isn't exactly cheap though, even if you stick with two 9600 GT cards. That said, combined with a CPU such as the Q6600, a 9600 GT and some DDR2 (modules you likely own), you have the base for a very speedy and relatively low priced gaming system. Unlike a P35, from an Nvidia standpoint, you can add a second Nvidia card for increased gaming performance if you play at high resolution.

Those of you who passed on the previous generation of Intel SLI boards will be pleased that many of the issues from before seem to be gone now. While not the fastest board, the performed well and overclocked well with some elbow grease. Stability was great. The only question mark on our end, due to some things falling through, we were not able to test the full video potential, so hopefully we'll correct that in the future.

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