As we've covered here at VL in the past, the 975X is not Intel's newest chipset, as that honour belongs to the Intel 965. The 975X has been out for some time, and offers a number of features such as dual PCI Express graphics, HD audio, dual core support, dual Gigabit LAN and depending on the board's revision, Conroe support.

The 975X was originally designed for the 900-series of processors from Intel, but not all 975X motherboards will support the power requirements of Conroe which the Intel 965-series motherboards are tailor made for. MSI had previously released an Intel based 975X Platinum motherboard, but support was limited to CPUs that were pre-Core 2 Duo. Version 2 of this board adds support for the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme and carries a part number of MS-7246 Ver 2.0.

The MSI 975X Platinum V.2 Motherboard

MSI includes a nicely designed user manual that covers all of the key features of the board. We would prefer more explanation is some areas, specifically in the BIOS, but otherwise, the manual does a great job in helping the user put their system together. For those who only need a quick run through, there is a quick install guide as well if you're an experienced system builder. The included software covers the basics, which is pretty much just the drivers. A driver CD contains all the required drivers for the motherboard, as well as the MSI included utilities.

There are a couple rounded cables which standard fare for MSI. The floppy and IDE cables are both coloured red and are sheathed in a plastic jacket. MSI also includes D-Brackets for FireWire and USB. The USB D-Bracket has four LED lights to aid in troubleshooting. The colour codes are listed in the main manual.

In addition to the floppy and IDE, there are four SATA cables as well as two SATA power cables. Not sure why they didn't just go with 4+4, but seeing as to how most modern power supplies have plenty of SATA connections, this should not be a big deal. Also pictured is the custom rear IO shield as well as a Socket-T installation clip. While we think most of our readers have the CPU install process down pat, MSI's CPU clip does make damaging your motherboard near impossible.

For the most part, everything is laid out quite well. The low profile heatsink on the South Bridge should not interfere with video card installation on PCI Express Graphic (PEG) slot #2. The CPU area is relatively clear of obstruction, with the larger capacitors further away from the socket area. MSI keeps the Intel "keep clean" zone completely free. The North Bridge heatsink as well as the memory slots are far enough that large CPU coolers should fit without issue. MSI nixes the CMOS reset jumper and replaces it with a red reset button on the edge of the motherboard. For those with clumsy fingers, this is a much better option than the jumper.

Motherboard cooling is taken care of by a large North Bridge cooler (and the smaller South Bridge cooler we already mentioned). Silent PC enthusiasts will be happy with this, though we did find the cooler quite warm to the touch. If you are going to be overclocking or using water cooling, it'll be a good idea to think about adding some active cooling in this area.

The four 240-pin DDR2 DIMM Slots are coloured coded and the MSI 975X Platinum officially supports up to 8GB of unbuffered memory. For dual channel, you will have to used match memory pairs in each channel bank (ex: DIMM 1+3 or DIMM 2+4). The supported speeds are DDR2 533/667/800. We had some success using faster memory, but depending on the quality of the ram, your CPU and general overclocking luck, your mileage may vary. Of course, if you do have higher spec'd memory, you can down clock it to the supported speeds. The memory slots are also far away enough so that the video card in PEG#1 should not interfere with the memory slot anchors.

Just beneath the memory slots are the primary and secondary IDE connections, one of which (IDE2) is controlled by the JMicron JMB361 chipset. We didn't jump aboard the SATA optical drive bandwagon just yet, as we would guess many other people have not either so kudos to MSI for keeping these with this board. The main 24-pin ATX power connection and floppy connection are also in this same area. For stable operation of the motherboard, you should make sure power is supplied to the 8-pin EATX12V connector located between the back panel connections and the North Bridge. Optional is the 4-pin Molex connector near the PCI Express x16 slot which supplies additional power for more advanced video cards.

In total there are five SATA connections on the MSI 975X Platinum. There are 4 SATA 3Gbps ports handled by the Intel ICH7DH, and in standard IDE mode, you do not need driver disks for Windows installation. The controller supports up to 300MB/s transfer speed, ACHI, RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. SATAII hot plugging is also supported. The JMicron JMB361 chipset controls the previously mentioned IDE2 as well as SATA5. RAID 0, 1 and JBOD are supported by the JMB361 with up to 2 Ultra ATA133 drives on IDE2 and 2 SATA drives on SATA5.

Moving on to the peripheral slots, we can see the two PCI Express Graphics x16 slots sandwiching two PCIE x1 connections. Dual slot coolers will kill the use of one PCIe and PCI slot, but at least you still have access to one of each otherwise. The added space (two slots between the PEG slots) will allow for specialized cooling for CrossFire setups. Of course, you'll likely lose the use of the adjacent PCI and PCIE slots, but this will not be the case if you stick with single slot cooling.

Round things out are the external inputs and outputs. From left to right we have; two PS/2 ports, one serial and parallel connection, FireWire, coax SPDIF, four USB 2.0, one Gigabit LAN and the audio connections. Azalia 1.0 audio is supported via the Realtek 882M physical interface.

The BIOS

Like most enthusiast boards, there are a large number of options for those who like to get their hands dirty in the BIOS. We'll skip directly to those areas since we figure most of you know how to fiddle with items like system time and boot order.

The MSI Cell Menu page is where most of you will probably spend a lot of time. Almost all key areas of CPU, memory and system manipulation can be done from this page.

The majority of users will be locked out of any CPU ratio settings since all retail and OEM Intel CPUs are factory locked. That said, if you happened to trip and find an unlocked CPU, the ratio ranges from 14 to 60, though the latter number is nothing more than a pipe dream. For the CPU frequency, you can go from 200MHz to 550MHz.

Memory options are quite extensive and allows for editing in 5 areas. By setting the DRAM Timing Selectable to "manual", all the main settings become available. CAS Latency ranges from 3 to 6. Ras# to CAS# Delay goes from 2 to 6. The same range exists for the RAS# Precharge. tRAS settings start at 8 and top off at 15.

Less experienced overclockers will probably be interested in MSI's DOT control page. From here, there are a number of predefined settings to choose from.

Private is the most conservative overclock and as you move up in rank, the percentage increases. Commander, the highest overclock, is still rather conservative from an enthusiast standpoint, but it does keep the system stable.

MSI does employ a BIOS Watchdog so to speak. If your OC settings end up being too aggressive, the CMOS will scale back to default speeds and not wipe out your other settings. However, this wasn't always perfect. It seemed to do the job with our CPU overclocking tests, but the memory overclocks often required us to fully reset the CMOS.

Test Setup

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2
Processor: Genuine Intel(R) CPU 3.20GHz (4 CPUs)
Memory: 2046MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT/GTO
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.9147

Comparison Motherboards: ASUS P5WD2 955X, Abit AWD9-MAX, Abit AB9-Pro

CPUs:

Going up against the MSI 975X Platinum motherboard will be the ASUS P5WD2 Premium 955X based motherboard, as well as the Abit AWD9-MAX (975X) and Abit AB9-Pro (965). All setups will share similar peripheral components, with the only difference being the motherboards.

Test Software is as follows:

- Our standard synthetic suite gets an upgrade. We like to use Sandra (System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) to collect some numbers as a base. The numbers collected are consistent and are easily comparable between systems during tests.

- 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.

- We run the full suite of tests offered by 3DMark06 at 640x480 and collect the total 3DMark score and CPU score.

Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 @ 640x480, HQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. Higher scores are better.

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.

NEXT