MSI P6N SLI Platinum Board Layout and Design
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The board layout that MSI devised for this chipset is actually quite good and we are glad to see MSI utilized muted colors and a black PCB design. The board features an excellent four-phase power design and a significant use of Conductive Polymer Aluminum Solid Capacitors. There are four fan headers (one 4-pin and three 3-pin) located in easy to reach positions on the board that are controlled through MSI's Dual Core Suite or the BIOS. We did find the new PC Alert program only reported on the status of two fans during testing.
MSI continues their tradition of being different by color coding the memory slots in a way that will confuse other owners of Intel boards. The memory slots are not color coded correctly for dual channel operation. You will need to insert memory in a green and orange slot for dual channel operation.
The board easily installed into our Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 case and cable management was very good for the optical and hard drives. The floppy drive connector is located at the bottom of the board and could present an issue for larger cases where the enclosed cable is not able to reach the floppy drive. The area around the CPU is slightly cluttered but we had no issues fitting our larger air coolers on this board. However, installation of our Tuniq 120 and Scythe Infinity coolers was slightly difficult due to the location of the 8-pin ATX power connector.
The PCI Express and PCI slot arrangements are designed with multiple graphics card operation in mind but this layout will mean the loss of a PCI slot if dual slot video cards are utilized. This will still leave two PCI slots and a single PCI-E x1 slot available for use. Like all 650i boards to date, this one requires the use of a paddle card to enable dual video card use.
The C55 SPP is cooled by a large passive heatsink that worked fine up until we started overclocking above 425FSB range, as that required an increase in voltage to 1.45V. This required the use of the included chipset fan to properly cool the SPP when an aftermarket cooler is installed that does not cool the surrounding components in the CPU area. We highly suggest a case with good airflow for this reason and the fact that the nForce 430i MCP does not receive active cooling.
Speaking of the nF430i MCP, it features four SATA 3Gb/s ports and two UltraATA 133 IDE ports that support up to four drives. This board offers an excellent balance of SATA and PATA drive capability. MSI breaks with recent tradition and utilizes a Silicon Image Sil3531 chipset for e-SATA capability on the back panel instead of the JMicron chipset used in most Intel P965 boards.
The audio subsystem is based on the Realtek ALC888 and offers 8-channel output. Realtek has had troubles recently with EAX 2.0 support but we did notice a slight improvement in the 1.61 driver set with several games, though Battlefield 2 continues to present problems for Realtek. The ADI 1988B HD audio codec on the upper end ASUS boards or the Creative X-Fi chipset utilized on the new MSI 680i still offers significantly better EAX audio quality in games than the Realtek HD codecs. MSI includes the excellent VIA VT6308 IEEE 1394 controller along with the Realtek RTL8211BL PHY for Gigabit Ethernet capability.
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MSI includes their Dual Core utility which is a decent Windows based software applications for overclocking and hardware monitoring. Our primary issue with the application is that FSB overclocking is limited to 371 and not all voltages are available for manipulation. We feel like this application is best for those needing moderate overclocks with their boards during game play or audio/video encoding activities. Our initial testing under Vista also revealed a few minor graphical glitches and an occasional lock-up. These problems should be resolved in the next update. Speaking of Vista, users will need to download the latest drivers and utilities from MSI's website as the Installation CD does not contain them. Otherwise, the board has performed very well in our initial Vista testing routines and benchmarks.
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