Verdict: A sluggish performer and inconsistent overclocker

The MSI P965 Platinum is a relative latecomer to the market, launching several months after most other manufacturers released their P965 motherboards.

MSI has opted for the no-frills approach with the P965 Platinum, and the only extra feature is a JMicron JMB361 chip, which adds an extra EIDE and S-ATA II port. This is practically a mandatory requirement for any P965 motherboard, as neither the ICH8 nor ICH8R Southbridge, which partners the P965 Northbridge, supports EIDE.

The P965 Platinum uses the more advanced ICH8R Southbridge, which offers six RAID-capable S-ATA II ports. It also supports 8-channel Intel HD Audio through a set of analogue jacks, and there's a coaxial S/PDIF output too. The P965 Platinum appears to have two 16x PCI-E slots, but the second slot only supports four PCI-E lanes. Even so, the P965 Platinum is one of the few P965 boards to support CrossFire.

In every test that we ran, the P965 Platinum was noticeably slower than any of the other P965 - or 975X-based motherboards. This is curious, as there's usually very little performance difference between motherboards that are based on the same chipset.

At first we thought that the P965 Platinum would be a good overclocker, as its BIOS allows you to increase the vcore by 0.7875V, and raise the Northbridge to 1.69V, the RAM to 2.45V and the FSB to 500MHz. Initially, we tried overclocking the FSB of our test Core 2 Duo CPU from 266MHz to 300MHz but, after several minutes of benchmarking, Windows crashed with a BSOD. After rebooting the system, we discovered that the Southbridge was damaged and would no longer recognise our S-ATA II hard disk.

Our second sample of the P965 Platinum from MSI also crashed at a 300MHz FSB, although this time it only corrupted the S-ATA drivers, rather than damaging the Southbridge. After reinstalling the drivers, we lowered the FSB to 290MHz, at which point the P965 Platinum was stable and error-free.

The P965 Platinum isn't only slow at its stock settings, it's also very a poor overclocker. With so many better P965 boards available, there's no reason to buy the P965 Platinum.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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