The Integrated Peripherals page allows you to enable or disable onboard features such as the Marvell drive controller, LAN and audio. The various drive options such as JBOD, or various levels of RAID for both controllers are handled in this section.

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.

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.

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 P35 Platinum Combo 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.

We used two sets of ram for testing. The first ram kit is Crucial's DDR3 Ballistix clocked at 1333MHz. Corsair's DDR2 Dominator was clocked at 999MHz (we had some problems with stability past this). Both kits were 2 x 1024MB sticks, configured in Dual Channel mode. We used the SPD settings as detected by the motherboard.

The comparison motherboard will be the Gigabyte P35-DS3R. This board will be configured with Dominator DDR2 for testing.

The software used is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra XII Lite - We ran the memory bandwidth benchmark.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast 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 Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex v170b2 was used to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

TMPGEnc 2.54 - We used an Animatrix file, titled The Second Renaissance Part 1, 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 CS2 Driver Heaven Test - 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 Checkpoint timedemo 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

What we're seeing here is a similar trend when we made the jump from DDR to DDR2. Until we see more DDR3 ram kits start hitting 1600MHz to make up for the increase in latencies, DDR2 is still going to have a strong showing in a lot of memory dependent benchmarks. The MSI outperforms the Gigabyte board using DDR2 by a small margin.

PiFast

Very close results here. We actually ran this five times, and there was consistently a half second difference between the two. Again, DDR2 is doing quite well for itself.

CDeX

A turnaround here as the Combo using the DDR3 scores a two second win here over DDR2 on the same board. While the Gigabyte also falls short of the MSI Combo using DDR2, it is one second faster than MSI using the same memory.