Verdict: A sensibly priced SLI motherboard.
Nvidia must be celebrating the day that it bought 3dfx. Not only did Nvidia kill off one of its archrivals, but it also obtained the rights to a three-letter acronym that it has milked like a ruthless dairy farmer: SLI. Nvidia is clinging to SLI like a barnacle that's developed a way of secreting Araldite. SLI support is seen as a clever strategy to make you buy a new Nvidia motherboard and two graphics cards, whereas previously you'd have only bought one card. And so a new range of SLI chipsets - the nForce 7-series - has been released in order to encourage you to upgrade your motherboard so that you can use two PCI-E 2.0 GeForce cards.
MSI uses the mid-range nForce 750i SLI chip in the new P7N SLI Platinum. As it's based on a mainstream SLI chipset, you'd expect this motherboard to be reasonably affordable but, priced at £120, it still isn't a budget product.
The P7N SLI Platinum uses the extravagant Circu-Pipe cooling system, which cools the Northbridge, Southbridge, nForce 200 SLI chip and the VRMs. It also has other features that could tempt you, such as the Clear CMOS switch on the back, so you don't have to open your case to rectify a failed overclock.
The board is sensibly laid out, with a reasonable amount of space around the CPU socket for a large cooler and the two power connectors situated towards the edge of the PCB. The P7N SLI Platinum has three PCI-E 2.0 slots, but only two of these can be used with SLI - 3-Way SLI isn't supported. The heatsink between the two SLI graphics slots won't get in the way of a graphics card, and if you use two dual-slot GeForce cards, you'll still have the third 16x PCI-E slot (which can be used with any PCI-E card) and the second of the two PCI slots. Note that the nForce 750i SLI chip can give either the primary slot 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes, or all three slots eight PCI-E 2.0 lanes.
The two EIDE ports are oddly placed toward the lower front edge of the board. However, S-ATA optical drives now cost £20, and the four S-ATA II ports are rotated so that the cables lie flat against your case.
To match the good layout, there are plenty of overclocking options in the BIOS. The overclocking feature that MSI is trying to push is its Dynamic Overclocking Technology (D.O.T.), which overclocks your CPU when it's under load. However, even the Commander setting (a 15 per cent overclock) is relatively feeble given the overclockability of the Core 2 Duo.
To achieve a boastworthy overclock, you need to delve into the BIOS settings for grown-ups. You can set the front side bus speed anywhere between 100MHz and 626MHz (2,500MHz effective), and adjust the CPU multiplier and PCI-E frequency too. The killer overclocking feature of an nForce motherboard is the ability to completely uncouple your FSB frequency from your memory frequency, which allows you to individually push your RAM and CPU to their respective limits.
The BIOS also lets you tweak the voltage of the FSB VTT, Northbridge and Southbridge. A maximum memory voltage of 3.1V is far more than you should need for DDR2, and the CPU voltage is listed as increments (up to +0.3875V), rather than the absolute values we prefer.
However, all this is only useful on an extremely overclockable motherboard, and this is where things become sticky. No matter how far we pushed the voltage of the Northbridge and the FSB, we couldn't get the motherboard to overclock stably with an FSB any higher than 450MHz (1,800MHz effective).
This wasn't enough to max out our Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 test chip, which can run at 3.66GHz (with a 458MHz FSB) using air cooling. This is disappointing when you consider that most boards based on Intel's P35 and X38 chipsets can run our test chip at 3.66GHz, and hit maximum FSBs of well over 500MHz (with a lowered CPU multiplier).
The P7N SLI Platinum's performance in our tests was also below par. Its main problem was the multitasking test, in which it scored just 862 even after overclocking. It fared better in the image editing and video encoding benchmarks, but this board is one of the slower models we've seen in the last few months.
Conclusion
The P7N SLI Platinum has a sensible layout and cooling for all the essential areas, and the BIOS is crammed with options. However, the price is too high for the performance and features on offer. The Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP currently costs £111, and is faster and far more overclockable. The MSI P7N SLI Platinum's only advantages are SLI and PCI-E support, but for a saving of £30, all you lose are the dubious advantages of SLI and PCI-E 2.0 support. If you want a cheap SLI motherboard then you'll get a better deal with the nForce 650i-based Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI, which costs just £69.31 from Scan.
