MSI P45 Platinum

The P45 chipset has arrived to take the reins from the P35 chipset. MSI's latest still uses the cheaper DDR2, allowing you to get the most from the new without the need to stop using the old.

Specifications

There are a few points that the Specifications don't cover. The first is MSI's new DrMOS and GreenPower, aimed at increasing power efficiency and lowering power usage. The P45 Platinum has some ye olde overclocking jumpers which allow you to increase the base FSB via hardware; personally I think this will be a little used feature by most. Enough time has passed that this would seem like a new feature to many, but the old(er) folks will remember these from days gone by when New Kids On The Block were cool. Like NKOTB, they should have probably remained in the past. That said, MSI's RapidBoost feature used in conjunction with the jumpers might better justify their inclusion. The MSI P45 Platinum is of course based on the P45 chipset and MSI did make a promise about their P45 boards a little while ago. Assuming that nothing has changed, MSI plan on releasing an updated UEFI BIOS for it's P45 boards sometime within the next few months. The entire board uses Japanese solid aluminum capacitors, and the North Bridge and Memory is regulated by a two phase setup, with a five phase setup for the CPU. We'll go into more details as we get to those points as I'm sure some of you are wondering about the five phase setup if nothing else.

The P45 Chipset itself, as I said before, really hasn't changed much from the P35, but it does have a couple of new features worth noting. The first is that unlike the P35, the P45 can run 16x4 or 8x8 Crossfire setups. Of course, Asus already did this on the P35 with their Crosslinx chip, but none the less it's good to have it natively. Secondly, the P45 has support for 4GB memory modules. Yeah, 16GB of ram sounds good to me too.

Right from the beginning we can see that MSI have ditched the traditional motherboard box in favor of the increasingly popular box-in-a-box with a handle. There is a definite gamer theme to be seen all over the box, and MSI have indeed branded the P45 Platinum as part of their Gaming Series of hardware. Ignoring the eye catching but large ugly medieval alien on the front cover, the real information is to hand on the rear of the box. MSI make big on their 'green-ness' with information on power efficiency and usage. Also detailed is their updated Circu-pipe cooling system as well as Overclocking and Crossfire information. Inside, an inner box holds all the goodies.

MSI supply quite a few extras with the P45 Platinum, some expected, some unexpected and some completely new (for MSI). Cabling is supplied, IDE, Floppy and SATA, as well as power adapters for SATA. A PCI Slot USB and Firewire bracket rounds out the things with cables. A Crossfire bridge is supplied as well as a packet with 6 M-Connectors, which lets you plug in your front panel/USB/Firewire/Other small pins into the connectors rather than directly into the board; you then plug the connectors into the board without the hassle of trying to fit multiple small pins into an already installed motherboard. MSI include enough connectors for all the pin outs on the motherboard.

A quick start guide as well as a manual are supplied, and separate driver disks for XP and Vista. Another new entry for MSI in the software department is a HDD backup software disk (and pamphlet manual for it).

Moving on to the board itself, we can see at a glance that things have changed from previous boards. We still have an elaborate heat-pipe cooling setup but we can instantly see plenty of room around the CPU socket. The new cooling setup does hide from view the P8 Aux power connector which is tucked away up top of the board.

Ram slots, and MSI have finally adopted the same coloring scheme as everyone else. Thank you MSI, it finally makes instant sense. Ironically, I had to check the manual to see if what was printed on the board was correct. 24 pin power is also in this area as is the floppy port should you need it.

Moving down we find six side facing SATA ports, and a singular side facing IDE port. Just behind them are two surface mounted SATA ports, powered by my old nemesis, the Jmicron controller. The battery has both the obligatory CMOS reset jumper and a surface mounted button. Also here is a surface mounted power button, which when you're fiddling around inside the case comes in very handy. I would have liked for them to have a bit clearer markings, perhaps different shaping to help indicate at a glance (inside a dark case) which is which but they function fine. Along the bottom are the color coded front panel, audio and USB pins.

The PCI area has two white PCI slots at the bottom, a secondary 4x PCIe (16x width) slot, two white 1x PCIe slots and the primary 16x PCIe slot. When it comes to Crossfire setups, the first PCIe 16x slot extends to dual 8x with the secondary slot for an 8x and 8x setup; a much better solution than 16x and 4x. You can also see a surface mounted female Molex, just in case your graphics card needs the extra power, but I doubt many folks will require it. Again, going with the simple 'at a glance' nature, the two graphic slots are both colored blue, but the primary is a slightly darker shade.

Just next to the twin PCIe 1x slots are a pair of jumpers which I touched on earlier in the introduction. These jumpers will allow you to hard set the starting FSB; 200 becomes 266, 266 becomes 333, 333 becomes 400. MSI also have a new feature known as RapidBoost, which is designed to help you get the highest overclock possible. RapidBoost has 2 modes; mode 1 will leave all of your hardware settings at default until your OS is loaded, thereby during overclocking hopefully getting past the whole “well I almost got to the Windows Welcome screen but then ...”. Mode 2 is similar but overclocks to 50% followed by 100% when the OS is loaded. This is where the hardware jumpers should come in, but in all honestly, I can't see why the RapidBoost system wouldn't be just as effective without the jumpers. The other thing is there positioning; with a graphics card or two in the system it's damn near impossible to get to them. MSI say that these jumpers should offer more stability when overclocking than BIOS settings, but I never saw any difference in that respect personally. Another hiccup here, I couldn't find the RapidBoost options in the BIOS at all.

Ok, let's get a look at the new Circu-pipe 2 cooling system. If anything, it's more aesthetically pleasing than before and certainly allows for a better motherboard layout. It does weigh a little bit however, but MSI have securely mounted the main cooling element to the board. Looks aside, there is five heatpipes and a lot of surface area so I'm anticipating some low temperatures from the board. In conjunction with the power efficiency of the MOSFET (DrMOS, -6W lower power than regular MOSFET) and the 2-phase power for the DIMM and Northbridge, temperatures should be well controlled. DrMOS is basically a combined twin MOSFET and Driver IC all rolled into the one chip, so power regulation phases are reduced down to five instead of the eight or more that has become common on other boards. These phase changes are adjusted by the GreenPower feature, and can be seen happening by the blue LED's on the motherboard. Speaking of which, the MSI P45 Platinum has more lights than my Christmas tree, but each of them indicates power regulation, usage or just simply power and are fully documented in the manual.

The I/O Panel looks a little sparse, but everything you could need in this day and age is there. PS2 ports for Keyboard and Mouse are far left, with four USB 2.0 ports (Twelve total on the board) above a Firewire, SP/DIF and eSATA (for a total of nine SATA ports). The little black dot next to the eSATA is a CMOS reset. A further two USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit NIC follow, with the six standard color coded audio jacks far right.

Overall the MSI P45 Platinum is probably one of the best laid out boards we have seen from MSI. Things are uncrowded, nothing appears to interfere with the installation of anything else, and there is a lot of ease of use features included (power and reset buttons, properly color coded ram slots, rear CMOS reset). Cooling looks great and should perform really well. Coupled with a good BIOS I expect some good things when it comes to overclocking, so let's take a look at it shall we.

As expected from MSI, the BIOS is an AMI based BIOS with the usual blue DOS like environment (roll on UEFI!), laid out in the usual MSI manner.

The Standard CMOS Features allows you to set the basics such as Data and Time, base hard drive operation, system information and halt settings. Usually we would comment on this page being there and move on, but worth a mention is that the eSATA port is identified as a separate entity.

The Advanced BIOS Features page allows you to set the options for the full screen logo, BIOS protection, Numlock, etc. There are a few sub menus to let you set/see the CPU Features, Chipset Features, Boot Sequence and Trusted Computing settings.

Integrated Peripherals obviously controls the integrated hardware such as LAN and Audio, but also has the settings for the SATA/ RAID modes.

Power Management is pretty much standard. The GreenPower entry lets you turn on the GreenPower features (Auto/Off) and is Off by default. CPU, DDR and MCH phase control can be set to auto or an exact phase as you require.

The Cell Menu is where all the fun stuff happens and hasn't really changed much from previous boards. CPU and DRAM frequencies are displayed/controlled here and everything is nicely grouped. One nice touch is that the CPU FSB is displayed in both QDR and real numbers. Going into the sub-menu for memory, you can see the SPD and EPP information (if you have it) of each module you have in the system. I expected to see an entry above the D.O.T. Control labeled Multi-step OC Booster; A.K.A the RapidBoost feature. Completely absent.*

*see updated overclocking

Overall, it's pretty much the usual fair for an MSI BIOS, although the GreenPower is new. I find this style of BIOS more intuitive to navigate than the Award BIOS personally, and you won't likely get lost in here. We have seen much more options in other BIOS from other boards, but everything you should need is here, and the majority of it has an automatic setting. Like many boards today, you should be able to set up the basics, and jump straight into overclocking. Saving multiple settings profiles is possible too. One thing I didn't see is provision for flashing your BIOS, and with a UEFI image, it's obviously not going to fit on a floppy either. Personally, I've been happy using Windows software (I hear a collective gasp of horror from many of you) for flashing for a while now, but if you simply do not trust Windows flashing software, you could always make a .

Software and Audio

I freely admit, I dislike MSI's Dual / Core Center software. Generally I'll install it, look around to see if anything is new for review purposes, and then uninstall it. I'd probably be more inclined to make more of an effort with it if it didn't just warn me my CPU fan was at 0 constantly. As a watercooling user, I don't have a CPU fan and all my other system fans are powered by a separate controller.

But, for the MSI P45 Platinum, it provides access to the GreenPower interface, which I have to say is quite simple and easy on the eyes. Everything is in it's own place, and it's all very easy to understand. Voltages for everything can be controlled here, from the VTT FSB Voltage to the current CPU PWM Power Phase. You are even told the current systems power draw; at least I hope it's the systems. It's marked as CPU Using Power, but I'm pretty sure that my E6420 isn't using 216W. Actually, I think it's a case of the decimal point is in the wrong place, since I also don't have a 23kW PSU ... then again I don't have a 2300W PSU either ... It's an interesting bit of software, and if it wasn't tied to the Dual / Core Center and it's constant CPU siren, even with the errors above I would persevere and probably use it during desktop overclocking/underclocking and day to day use*. One other thing, I thought that when the software started, that it was disabled, so I of course hit the enable button which promptly disabled it. The problem is that the button marker is also the status indicator, so when it says Green Power Center Disable, it's enabled and you click disable to disable it. A little confusing.

*It turns out you can use GreenPower without DualCoreCenter, just go into the MSI directory and run it from the GreenPower directory/create a shortcut to it.

All these little issues do mean that the software comes across as very beta, which is a shame really. Hopefully it won't take MSI too long to sort it out. Perhaps an interface based on the Green Power interface could be used for the entire Dual / Core Center software, with tabs for the various sections.

Audio

MSI uses the Realtek ALC888 7.1 channel High-Definition audio codec for the P45 Platinum, which works well enough. There are certainly better options out there though, but for general sound output it works fine. Subjectively, unless you are listening on an expensive pair of headphones/speakers, you will find the sound OK but a little heavy on the mid range. If you are looking for something a little bit special, perhaps with Dolby/DTS features or even a basic card for HTPC use, then I'd start looking for a 3^rd party card now. This is a Ford, not a Ferrari when it comes to sound.

Testing

Test Setup: Intel E6420 (2.13GHz), 2x 1024MB Patriot DDR2 PC2-6400, MSI 8600GT, Maxtor 500GB 16MB Cache HDD, Vista Home Premium SP1

For Comparison, the MSI P35 Platinum and the Asus Blitz Formula (P35) were used.

Testing Suite

- 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.

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.

Auto-MKV – We converted the newly created VOB files from our War of the Worlds bonus feature to a 350MB MP4 and recorded the time taken.

- Photoshop is probably the defacto standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is so popular, we have incorporated DriverHeaven's latest test into our review process. Lower scores are better and time is 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 a custom timedemo for ETQW.

SiSoft Sandra XII Lite – CPU Arithmetic

SiSoft Sandra XII Lite – Memory Bandwidth

SiSoft Sandra XII Lite – Multimedia

While the P45 chipset isn't a huge leap up from the P35, I did expect performance to be on par if not better than the previous generation for the MSI P45 Platinum. That's not to say the scores are bad, but it does trail behind our P35 based comparison boards which seems strange. Still, this is a synthetic test so perhaps our real world tests will show that numbers don't always mean everything.

PiFast

Our P45 Platinum again sits behind the other two boards, although again it is just behind.

CDeX

It would seem that the more mature P35's are quite the performers here, while the MSI P45 Platinum clearly needs some help, perhaps a BIOS update, to help things along.

DVD Shrink

The memory performance on the Asus Blitz Formula was tweaked by the Asus engineers, and it shows in this test. Here the MSI P45 Platinum draws level with it's older sibling.

Auto-MKV

This is a new test for Viperlair, one that will hopefully better show the differences between subsystems. Sure enough, the longer time needed to convert our VOB to MP4 shows the clear performance difference. Keep in mind, the only thing that's changed is the motherboard.

Photoshop CS2

Again, the two P35 boards show they are no slouches while the newer MSI P45 Platinum trails slightly behind.

Gaming - ETQW

Gaming - Crysis

Both ETQW and Crysis rely on a decent CPU, Memory and Subsystem setup to run in tandem with the graphics to enable smooth gameplay. The MSI P45 Platinum, while not performing badly, doesn't do as well as the other two boards. I've gotten the feeling througout testing that a BIOS update is needed to improve on the memory performance, as this seems to be the area which is holding the P45 Platinum back in our tests.

Overclocking

Before I get into the actual overclocking, I just want to comment on a few oddities and features that are related. The first as I mentioned before is that for me, there was no sign of the RapidBoost options. Having read the manual cover to cover, there was no sign of it in there either. Also, to begin my manual overclocking, I did what anybody would do and disabled anything that could possibly hinder my efforts. However, despite disabling EIST in the BIOS, my CPU was still happily changing speeds dynamically with the load. Lastly, MSI have an overclocking failure feature that when an overclock prevents post, after the 4th boot attempt, the BIOS is set to defaults automatically, negating the need to reset the BIOS via jumper or in this case via a button. This never worked for me; infact neither did the CMOS reset buttons. In the end, if ever I was forced to reset the BIOS, I had to remove the battery to get the system to POST again.

Stability wise, if I left everything on automatic, the MSI P45 Platinum was solid. If however I started playing with the settings, I would get issues of non-post and be forced to remove the battery. With that in mind, I ended up having to leave pretty much everything on automatic. I dialled down the Multiplier from 8 to 6 and began to raise the FSB. I started at 400 and that was as far as I got. No matter what else I did it would never go over 400. Keep in mind that for general use I run this CPU at 400 FSB, Multiplier x8 daily, it was pretty dissapointing. It's a real shame as the hardware appears to be absolutely fantastic, but the software and BIOS is letting the side down.

*Update

As hoped, MSI have (at time of writing) just released a new 1.1 BIOS. But flashing the BIOS turned out to be an adventure on it's own.

The BIOS file is 4MB, so that counts out installing via floppy, not that I've attached one to a machine in over 2 years anyway. Next logical choice is to use Windows software. MSI Live Monitor didn't pick up on the update at all, telling me I was already up to date. So third option is a bootable USB Flash Drive. No Flash drive I tried would boot. They were seen at POST, and the option was in the F11 boot menu, but they simply refused to boot. In the end, I made a bootable SD card and flashed that way. MSI really need to include a better way to do this, even adding a way to use a local file to flash with to their MSI Live Update, or better still some way to do it via the BIOS. We've seen some boards with onboard flash memory for use with Vista's Readyboost; wouldn't it be great if we could download a BIOS to that and flash from an option in the BIOS settings?

So, new BIOS. The new BIOS loses it's 'beta' feel; no longer are there corrupt letters in the Memory SPD list, the RapidBoost options are now there, the PC auto resets as it should if you overclock too far. A ClockGen Options entry has been added, as well as two extra slots for saving your settings. SpeedStep finally acts on the setting in the BIOS rather than remaining permanently enabled. Running the same batch of tests as the previous BIOS yielded little to no change in the performance however, and we were still unable to break the 400 FSB mark. I switched (again) to some Kingston ram, but this afforded no change in FSB overclocking. It would seem that running the ram at 800 is fine, but anything after this and you have problems. Setting the divider so the memory was below this 800 mark didn't help. However I was able to now tweak the memory options manually without the board failing POST, so some progress has certainly been made. Hopefully the next BIOS update will allow the board to raise it's FSB too. And of course, as with any item running out of spec, Your Mileage May Vary.

**Update No 2

MSI were understandbly a little dissapointed that the P45 Platinum wouldn't overclock as well as expected, and I was dissapointed as well because the hardware really is great. A shout out to the folks in the MSI forums, as well MSI themselves who have emailed me constantly with suggestions and ideas. In the end, it was a combination of MSI's Tech support, some user experiences in the MSI forums and a new BIOS, v 1.22. This has allowed me to finally raise the FSB, as I knew it should have done from the beggining.

470 was the highest stable (Orthos and 3dMark tested), although the board was able to get into Windows and run randomly up to 480. Anything over 480 resulted in non-POST. I've adjusted my Final Words accordingly

Final Words

A fine wine (or woman) improves with age they say. The comes across as fine wine which has improved nicely after a couple of BIOS updates. The hardware is excellent, without a doubt some of the best we have seen come out of , if not the best, and was only held back in overclocking by an immature BIOS.

have made a lot of changes of late to the way they package, present and even design their hardware, and it shows here quite clearly. Starting at the beggining, the packaging for the has changed to a box-in-a-box affair which we rather like.

Simplicity is the name of the game with the , from the industry following color coding on the DIMM Slots to the inclusion of the M-Connectors. 

Even in the BIOS, the majority of options can be simply left on automatic, but that's not to say you don't have options to dive in and get your hands dirty. Speaking of the BIOS, MSI have said that they will be offering a UEFI update for their P45 based lineup in the near future. How this will change things for the is anyones guess, but one thing is for sure, when it comes to the BIOS, the should be updated to 1.1 or more for you to get the best out of it. We had a less then perfect time when it came to overclocking the , as the highest FSB we could manage was a relatively low 400 FSB, and this was with two different offical BIOS. The Third BIOS and a few voltage bumps got us out of the middle of the pack and up near pole position, with the final stable overclock being 470 FSB.

During our testing, we noticed that memory performance, while around what we would expect from a P45 chipset, wasn't as good as we would have hoped, nor as good as the more mature P35 based boards we used from previous reviews. Still, it took time for the P35's to really shine so hopefully when the BIOS is tweaked we will see good things.

The board is laid out fantastically, and the new Circu-pipe 2 setup is both attractive and performs well. The hardware appears to be rock solid, and for the lazy overclockers out there, the ability for the P45 Platinum to reset itself after a failed overclock is a boon. With a newer BIOS, the good really starts to shine and show itself to be a great board. If and when update the to the UEFI BIOS, we shall certainly be back for round two.

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