MSI P965 Platinum Motherboard

This is a high-end board that supports Intel Pentium 4 and Pentium D

processors on the LGA 775 package as well as Core 2 Duo. It has 1066 MHz FSB and

4 DDR2 DIMM slots that support up to 8 GB of RAM. For storage, it has seven SATA

II ports. Expansion options are extensive and include eight USB ports, two PCI

Express 16X slots with 1x16 and 1x4 operations, two PCI Express 1X slots, and

two PCI 2.3 32-bit



Master PCI Bus slots. However, it doesn't have on-board graphics.

We tested this board with an Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 CPU at 1.86 GHz, and used

Nvidia GeForce7800 GT graphics card for display. On PCMark'05, it ticked 5519

and scored 7126 on the 3DMark 2005 benchmark. This is much lower than the

Gigabyte GA 965P-DS3, which scored 7519 and 8166 for these tests respectively.

With a series of tests with the game FEAR, it scored 203 pps with 1024x768

resolution, which is average. We ran POV-RAY and it scored 295.34 pps with

single core CPU rendering and 491pps with dual core.

Bottom Line: Though not the best performing board, it is a good buy

for its price and features.