We recently took a look at Abit's Fatality AA8XE motherboard which was based on the now aging 925XE chipset from Intel and came away with a favourable impression of the chipset and its subsequent performance. Recently motherboards became available which utilize the new Intel 945 chipset, one of which we have in for review today.

The MSI 945P Neo Platinum, as the name suggests uses Intel’s non-onboard gfx 945 chipset and mixes it with MSI’s own feaures such as the DOT3 overclocking. To aid all of you pondering your next upgrade on the socket 775 platform we will include comparison results from Abit’s AA8XE Fatal1ty board and the recently released P5ND2-SLI Deluxe board from Asus which is based on the Nforce 4 chipset.

The MSI 945P Neo Platinum

The 945P comes packaged in a pretty cool box which gives you some information on the cool features of the board (such as DTS support and support for dual core CPU’s).

As our review product is one of the first available it was so new it didn’t have the final MSI branded Driver/utility CD, I/O shield or manual with it, however the rest of the bundle was complete and featured the following items:

Sata cable, IDE cable, floppy drive cable, Sata power cable, DTS demo disk and PCI brackets for extra USB and fire wire ports.

The board itself is very well designed, one of the best designed boards we have used in fact. Quite often with boards we receive you end up with issues such as front panel USB/Fire wire connector wires having to route through the system to the middle of the motherboard, or there is hardly any room between the memory slot clips and the back of your GFX card, the 4pin PSU connector is in an odd position which means the wire interferes with your CPU cooler or possibly worst of all the floppy connector is placed at the base of the board, just about as far away from the drive as it possibly could be. All of these might seem like minor issues however they do make changing components harder, airflow worse and if you have a window on your case they make the system look worse. MSI haven’t fallen into any of those traps with the 945P Neo Platinum and the board was a joy to set up.

As you can see the USB/FW headers are all placed along the bottom of the board, the Sata connectors are exactly where they should be for most cases and are even attached vertically which means they are closer to the edge of the case, and consequently the drives themselves. IDE and floppy connectors are placed closer to where the actual drives are located also and are positioned in such a way that the cables for the power and IDE/Floppy do not interfere with one another (even if you have a chunky PSU connector such as those provided by Ultra in their X-Connect brand).

Memory slots have sufficient clearance at the lower end to allow easy insertion and removal of the gfx card and the slots are clearly labelled to show how to set up the channels for dual or single operation. Whilst this isn’t an essential it’s nice to see MSI taking the effort to do this and saves time which would have been spent flicking through the manual.

Next: MSI 945P (continued)