Well, if the $170 US price tag associated with this high-end Intel P45 motherboard fails to grab your attention, the board design certainly won’t! You have to hand it to MSI, they have gone outside the box with this design. While ASUS and Gigabyte are battling each other to deliver the biggest and most outrageous cooling designs, MSI stuck with a relatively slim design that is every bit as exciting. That said, we did run into a few compatibility issues when trying to... Read more

MSI P45 Platinum

Mid-range motherboard. Middle-of-the road features and price, so it's neither most feature-packed nor the cheapest. Read more

MSI P45 Platinum

We admit it, sexy chipsets such as Nvidia’s nForce 790i SLI Ultra and Intel’s X48 get all the ink, but in reality, most of the world runs on plain-vanilla chipsets such as Intel’s new P45. And the truth is, you don’t necessarily give up performance or features when you choose a middle-of-the-road board; in fact, the affordable MSI Platinum has just about everything you’d want in a motherboard. Read more

MSI P45 Platinum

Despite our initial complaints about the BIOS, once it's left to entirely do what it likes the board is really very stable. We set it up as usual and ran both a QX9650 with a 9800 GTX with both Prime95 torture test and 3DMark06 looping for 24 hours and found it was perfectly stable with the system still completely responsive. CrossFire, however, was a different matter. Like the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 we looked at recently, we found that the board would fall over after just... Read more

With Computex finally over, we now have a lot of new technology to play with, including the official launch of the Intel 4 series chipsets. We have already got the X48 chipset on the market, which is the high end 4 series chip, but now we have been given the announcement of the P45 chipset with the G45, G43 and the P43 also on its way. Read more