The Tomorrow’s Star of Intel Platform- MSI P965 Platinum First Exposure

[windwithme]

The last third part of July, 2006 will be another milestone of processors
Intel gives up the Pentium 4 structure which they use for several years,
then back to the low frequency/ high performance/ low temperature
structure with is similar to AMD K8, and release several processors base on
code name Conroe instead of Pentium series.







Base on the new-gen processors
The Supporting chipsets include the high-end 975X ( have to change the circuit design of motherboards)
and the lower price,mainstream segment,which is called 965 chipset.








The board what I get is MSI P965 Platinum
The whole appearance of the board












The right bottom of the board.
The official spec of P965 for PCI Express is one X16
But MSI add one yellow PCI Express x16 slot runs at X4 speed
The Sound chip is Realtek ALC883, 7.1 channel















The right bottom of the board.
The south bridge is the latest ICH8R, supports 6 SATA2, with AHCI controller and RAID 1, 5, 10
In addition, the JMicron JMB361 storage chip provide 1 IDE and 1 SATA2
So we can connect up to 7 SATA drives
















The above part of the board
The component around CPU socket looks good.
The north bridge of P965 is equipped with a sheet of heat sink.
Although the temperature of Intel chipset is not low, but it still lower than NVIDIA nF4/nF500 series,
so I think it is enough to use the heat sink on 975/965 chipset.














The I/O part
It has 4 USB, one 10/100/1000 Mb/s LAN, one S/PDIF output, one IEEE1394,
and 6 mini-jack analogue audio output.

















Testing Platform
CPU:INTEL Core 2 Extreme X6800
MB: MSI P965 Platinum
DRAM:Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3
VGA:MSI RX1900XTX CrossFire
HD:Seagate 7200.7 80GB
POWER:AcBel 550W
Cooler:Tower112


















Let us do some warm-up testing
DDR2-1000 3-4-4-9 2.3V SP2004X2 working stably











It looks an attractive Conroe board.
The BIOS introduction and another performance test result, please wait for
windwithme do the complete testing later…