P35 Platinum is one of the fastest socket 775 motherboards available today, providing full support for the forthcoming Core 2 Duo CPUs with 1,333 MHz external bus.

It comes with several extra features, like two eSATA ports (allowing you to connect external hard drives at their full speed), two FireWire ports, 12 USB 2.0 ports, decent on-board audio quality, two x16 PCI Express slots supporting CrossFire (even though one of them work at x4), an exotic passive cooling solution and diagnostics LEDs.

The overall quality of this motherboard is great, as MSI use only solid aluminum capacitors and also ferrite coils instead of iron coils.

There are only two things we didn’t like about this motherboard. One was its overclocking capability, below all major motherboards we reviewed recently. However we didn’t play with any fancy adjustments, so you may achieve a better overclocking than we did.

The second thing was its price. The cheapest place we saw was carrying it for USD 184. That is at least USD 50 more than nForce 650i-based motherboards like ASUS P5N-E SLI. If you compare average price with average price we are talking about a huge USD 70 gap between the two.

So average users have an option of buying a cheaper motherboard based on nForce 650i, which brings two PCI Express x16 slots supporting SLI. The drawback is that nForce 650i motherboards are a little bit slower than MSI P35 Platinum. ASUS P5N-E SLI continues to be, in our opinion, the best cost/benefit for the average user looking for a decent mainstream motherboard full of features.

Comparing the features, ASUS P5N-E SLI has only one eSATA port (instead of two on P35 Platinum), uses an inferior audio codec, meaning that you can’t use it for professional analog audio editing and capturing with it and doesn’t support DDR2-1066 memories, but on the other hand has an outstanding overclocking capability (the best overclocking we could get with a socket 775 motherboard to date).

We think the correct price for this motherboard should be around USD 145, USD 150 tops. Until it doesn’t drop to this price point, we will still recommend ASUS P5N-E SLI instead. Unless, of course, you don’t mind paying USD 70 more for only 5% performance gain – or if you really need RAID.

Don’t get us wrong. MSI P35 Platinum is a very good motherboard; we only think it is overpriced.