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Written by Milos Stamenkovic
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Tuesday, 06 March 2007 |
Given that MSI applied very nice and efficient passive solution of chipset cooling on this board, in P6N SLI Platinum set you will be provided with additional cooler designated for installation on C55 Northbridge, which will provide stable operation at higher overclocking. Order of components on PCB is very good, thus considering this question we don’t have any objections.
Regarding voltage unit, MSI is even at P6N SLI Platinum model applied its, now standard, 4-phase solution with utility of CPAS condenser which provides increased operation stability in conditions of greater load.
The only fault of voltage unit refers to appreciable "under voltage" problem, but this is the fault with numerous motherboards, so it cannot be taken into account as bad issue in this case, particularly if we have in mind that through BIOS and pretty high voltage spans which are usable, this problem could be very much neutralized. Processor may go up to +0.375 of nominal voltage and memory even up to 2.8 V.
There are additional settings of voltage for both parts of the chipset, as well as (shown as significant issue with overclocking) FSB VTT option where voltage could be increased up to 20%. Unfortunately, in its desire to hit the market first, and to attract as much media attention it can, and with P6N SLI Platinum model, MSI continued its practice to test motherboards with beta versions of BIOS, which here is definitely easily appreciable.
Due to that matter, only big adjustment could help with commuting the bus speed of 400 MHz, where chipset voltage correction options and FSB play significant role. Besides, there are more tiny problems, such as frequent blocking of boot sequence and requiring reset of hard disk, and disability of multiplier alternation on processor. Unstable operation of memory with 1T parameter could cause slightly weaker performances, thus during the test we were forced to use 2T. However, even with 2T memory, performances are minimally lowered and may be seen only through the tests, not through real operation.
Having in mind all aforesaid details, MSI with P6N SLI Platinum model is very close to create successful motherboard. However, in this very moment BIOS is one who obstructs us to freely recommend this motherboard.
| 1024x768 | MSI P6N SLI Platinum | | | | Sandra 2007 SP1 | | | Processor | 17112 / 11904 | | Multimedia | 102158 / 55332 | | Memory | 5581 / 5567 | | Latency (less is better) | 84 | | 3DMark2001SE (Soft T&L) | 10511 | | 3DMark06 Final / CPU Score | 3959 / 1617 | | AquaMArk 3 | 86783 | | Quake4 (MediumQ) | 108,43 | | FarCry (MediumQ) | 151,38 | | Cinebench 9.5 (more is better) | 557 | | WinRAR 3.60 (more is better) | 916 | | Nuclearus 1.0 (more is better) | 5597 | | DivX 6.2.5 (more is better) | 95,96 | | Testbed | Intel E6300, 2x1 GB DDR2 800, 7600GT, WD600, WinXP SP2 |
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Naturally, BIOS problem could also be solved very quickly, and if that happens, P6N SLI Platinum becomes worth-of-mention candidate if you think about Core 2 motherboard directed to SLI systems. |
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