MSI P965 Platinum provides many overclocking options, including dynamic overclocking. What is different on this motherboard from other boards from MSI is that you can choose dynamic overclocking to be used only on the CPU, only on the PCI Express bus, or on both.

On MSI P965 Platinum (1.20 BIOS) you will find the following overclocking options:

• FSB clock: Can be adjusted from 266 to 500 MHz in 1 MHz steps.
• PCI Express clock: Can be adjusted from 100 MHz to 133 MHz in 1 MHz steps.
• CPU voltage: +0 V to +0.7875 V in 0.0125 V increments.
• Memory voltage: 1.85 V to 2.45 V in 0.05 V increments.
• North bridge voltage: 1.26 V to 1.42 V in 0.04 V increments plus 1.47 V, 1.51 V, 1.59 V, 1.67 V, 1.75 V and 1.84 V.

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Figure 7: Overclocking options on MSI P965 Platinum (1.20 BIOS).

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Figure 8: Dynamic overclocking options.

The PCI Express clock configuration is very important, as you can lock the PCI Express clock at a given value (100 MHz, for example). Usually when you increase the FSB clock you will automatically increase the PCI Express clock as well, and sometimes your overclocking will be limited not by the CPU but by the devices connected to the PCI Express bus. Thus with this option you can increase the probability of setting a higher overclocking.

We could only find two features missing: adjustment for the memory timings and a separated clock configuration for the x16 PCI Express slot. But we think that the features present will satisfy almost all users. Of course if you want even more overclocking options, you will need to buy a high-end motherboard.

With this motherboard we could increase the FSB clock of our Core 2 Duo E6700 from 266 MHz to 306 MHz and the system worked just fine. We locked the PCI Express bus at 100 MHz and configured the memory as DDR2-800 in order to keep them under their specs.

The overclocking we achieved represents a 15.04% increase on the CPU internal clock, making our 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 to run at 3.06 GHz. The performance measured by PCMark05 increased 9.24% and the performance measured by Quake 4 increased 14.26% with this overclocking – really nice.

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Figure 9: Our 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 running at 3.06 GHz (308 MHz x 10) on MSI P965 Platinum.

We can consider this overclocking to be on the same level of Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (which we could put its FSB running at 208 MHz) but worse than the one we could achieve with ASUS P5B (316 MHz).

It is very important to keep in mind that our overclocking is limited by the overclocking capability of the CPU we used, a Core 2 Duo E6700. Also, the CPU overclocking capability is not only defined by its model, but also by its production batch. You may achieve better results with different CPUs and even with the same CPU model but from a different batch.

We didn’t play with voltage adjustments or any other fancy adjustments, so you may achieve a better overclocking than we did with more time and patience.