MSI P45 Platinum Motherboard

Introduction

A few months back, Intel released the P45 Chipset -- at the time it was considered to be their mainstream offering, playing second fiddle to the X48 Express. With official support of a 1333MHz FSB, PCI-E 2.0, ATI CrossFire, and support for both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, there's a lot of roads to go down with the construction of one of these boards, and MSI went down all of them. MSI fleshed out a complete top-to-bottom assortment of boards, which means that they have a P45 motherboard that suits just about every potential buyer's needs. The P45 Platinum is the top end of their food chain, and we'll be taking a look at it today.


Evolution of P35 Express chipset

As the name suggests the MSI P45 Platinum is based on the new Intel P45 chipset. The P45 chipset, codenamed Eaglelake, is the successor to the P35 chipset, also known as Bearlake. The P45 chipset was developed to support the latest Penryn processors where high FSBs are required.

P35 has a total of 20 lanes of PCI Express Gen 1 with 16 lanes for the main graphics card. Add a second ATi card in CrossFire and it gets a mere four lanes of PCI Express, while adding insult to injury any PCI Express expansion slots on the board are disabled.

In essence, then, P35 is only intended to offer support for a single graphics card, but with P45 the graphics support is far more sensible. You still get 20 lanes of PCI Express but it is Gen 2, with double the bandwidth that operates with 16 lanes for a single graphics card or dual x8 if you're using CrossFire. There are a number of vendors offering X2 graphics cards with two Radeon GPUs on a single graphics card, so it is perfectly possible to install four GPUs in two graphics slots to achieve CrossFire X on the P45 chipset.

This is a useful change, but it's under the surface with the result that the P45 Platinum looks very similar to the P35 Platinum. Indeed, the only discernible visual difference on the P45 Platinum is the Circu-Pipe 2 cooling system, which has been heavily revised from the original Circu-Pipe that we saw on the X38 Diamond and X48 Platinum models.