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Final
Words
Huy's Two Cents
As we've pointed out earlier, Dynamic Overclocking
Technology (D.O.T.) is featured on the MSI
P35 Platinum Combo. As the systems loads up, the PC will
dynamically overclock. For testing, we disabled this, but a quick
run through as General allowed us to gain an additional 5% on average
of performance. For some odd reason, Commander caused us some stability
issues, despite manually adjusting the CPU voltage to try to stabilize
the system.
Overclocking the old fashioned way was actually very
easy, despite the E6750's 333MHz FSB. With little effort, we were
able to reach 490Mhz on air. Granted, we've had to increase the
voltages to the max for CPU and chipset, but this was impressive
considering we were using air cooling. I was able to squeeze an
extra 4MHz out of the Gigabyte board, but given in the past I've
had some issues with overclocking MSI boards, I was quite pleased
with the results. Before getting too excited though, I did run into
some crashes after about an hour of repeated benchmarks, and had
to knock the system back to 486MHz to run smoothly.
Stability throughout testing, save for the small hiccup
while overclocking, was excellent. As I'll let Hubert explain shortly,
the MSI
P35 Platinum Combo worked super right out of the box. It's
one of those rare things as we'll be talking about here in the near
future, many products like to throw lefts when you're expecting
a right.
The P35 chipset is intended for mainstream audiences,
but the pricing is still relatively high right now, despite Intel's
latest X48 hitting the market. The MSI
P35 Platinum Combo is priced a little lower than other P35
boards, but it's not hovering in the $110 to $120 range as the P965
chipset did during its peak.
Despite
the mainstream moniker, the P35 is a very capable chipset and boards
such as the MSI P35 Platinum Combo are viable options for the majority
of users, performance minded included. DDR2 performance was very
impressive, and while DDR3 performance wasn't bad, those of you
waiting for prices to drop can still make use of DDR2 in the meantime.
Hubert's Two Cents
As Huy alluded to, we've had some issues in the past
when setting up test systems and most recently it was the first
MSI P35 Platinum, non-Combo, we received last year. We were never
able to get the system up and running, going through two boards
and three different reviewers (Scott was also unable to get the
board running). There were two possible causes though, which is
not entirely MSI's fault. We believe the board had issues detecting
the microcode on our X6800, though Scott used an entirely different
CPU. A few sites had problems with Corsair ram, but again, Scott
still had problems despite using totally different DDR2.
Fast forward to present day and we had absolutely
no issues with using Corsair Dominator DDR2 modules, to an extent.
Despite many boards supporting upwards of 1066MHz, the MSI P35 Platinum
Combo simply would not POST at 1109Mhz. The next step down was 999Mhz,
which worked like a charm.
We came away very impressed with the MSI P35 Platinum
Combo and have no problems recommending it to our readers.
If
you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
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