MSI P6N SLI Platinum Motherboard

The MSI motherboard comes with nVidia nForce 650i SLI chipset. It is designed

to support Intel Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, Pentium XE and Pentium

D processors, and also supports FSB of 1333/ 1066/ 800/ 533 MHz. The motherboard

has 4 memory modules supporting maximum of 8 GB of RAM. It has 1 Gbe LAN port

and also an IEEE 1394. It is supplemented with 2 IDE ports and 4 SATA ports and

supports RAID 0, 1 and 5. MSI comes with 2 PCI Express x16, 1 PCI Express x1 and

3 PCI slots. The second PCI Express, x16 slot, supports PCI Express x1 x8 mode

only. Like Asus Crosshair, this motherboard has a heat pipe that runs over the

board and a tiny fan mounted over the heat pipe with screws provided.

We tested the motherboard with 1 GB RAM, Intel Core-2 CPU 6300 at 1.86 GHz

and Windows XP SP2; for display we used Radeon X1950 Series graphic card.

Running 3DMark 05 gave score of 10486 3DMarks and 3DMark 06 gave 5876, which was

good compared to Asus Crosshair. Score in PCMark ticked up to 5677 PCMarks, in

Doom3 it again performed well and gave 134.9 FPS and in POVRay it gave an

average of 107.48 PPS. Finally, in Cinebench 9.5, it gave 311 CB-CPU with single

core and 576 CB-CPU with dual core, which makes MSI a good performer.

Bottom Line: Overall a good performer and, considering its price, a

good buy for gamers.