MSI P965 Platinum is, in our opinion, the motherboard that provides the best cost/benefit ratio for the mainstream user building a Core 2 Duo-based system. In other words, this motherboard is targeted to users that want a high-end performance and features but don’t want to spend a lot of money on a high-end motherboard.
What is great about this motherboard is that it provides more features that its competitors like ASUS P5B and Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 and costs the same thing or less (you can get a USD 15 mail-in rebate at Newegg.com and this board from MSI will cost you only USD 120).
MSI P965 Platinum uses ICH8R chip instead of the plain ICH8 used by Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 and ASUS P5B, supporting six SATA-300 ports with RAID0, 1, 10 and 5, plus one extra SATA-300 port. It also has FireWire ports and a second x16 PCI Express slot (working at x4 though), allowing you to connect a second video card for attaching three or four video monitors to your system or to increase your 3D performance, as according to MSI it supports CrossFire technology (keep in mind that as this slot works at x4, CrossFire performance will be lower than other motherboards were the two slots work at x16).
On the other hand, we achieved a higher overclocking with ASUS P5B.
This motherboard is faster than boards based on Intel 975X chipset, which is great. It also supports DDR2-1066/PC2-8500 memories and has a good overclocking potential for its market segment, features that will surely attract users wanting to pump the maximum performance possible from their systems.
It also features SPDIF optical and coaxial outputs, allowing you to connect its on-board audio to digital speakers or to your home theater receiver. Keep in mind that this motherboard has a low (for today’s standards) signal-to-noise ratio on its audio inputs (85 dB), so this board isn’t a good choice if you want to capture analog audio and edit it on your PC professionally (for this task we recommend a minimum 95 dB SNR ADC, i.e., for the inputs).
The electrolytic capacitors used on its voltage regulator are aluminum solid, preventing you from suffering from the infamous capacitor leakage problem – at least on this section of the motherboard, which is the section that suffers from this disease. Having all other motherboard capacitors aluminum solid too would be the best – but that would be asking too much.
