Silent, fan-less operation is something that ASUS have been promoting recently and its something that’s also important to me, there is noting worse than trying to play an atmospheric game or watch a movie with a whiny little chipset fan whirring away in the background. Thankfully with this board MSI have taken the same route so other than your choice of GPU and system fans there is no additional noise in the system, which also makes it ideal for consideration as a media centre motherboard. Interestingly MSI’s north and Southbridge heat sinks are relatively small compared to those which are included with the older 925XE chipset.

Some of you will have noticed the coloured PCI slot on the board, this slot is recommended for the optional wireless/Bluetooth kit which can be purchased from MSI and is optimised for enhanced performance over standard PCI slots.

The other slots on the board come in the form of 2 Standard PCI slots, 2 1x PCI-Express slots and a 16x PCI-Express graphics slots. We tried a multitude of different devices in each slot including PCI Audio cards, TV tuners, PCI-Express network and audio cards and graphics cards of varying types and power requirements. All worked without issue on the 945P Neo.

The rear panel of the MSI 945P features all of the standard connectors. You have your PS2, Serial, parallel, digital and analogue audio, GB LAN and USB ports. As mentioned in the bundle section of the review there are additional connectors in the form of USB and fire wire provided on the PCI brackets. You can see from the space on the back panel that there is a “missing” connector. The reason for this is MSI also offer a 945G model which has onboard Intel graphics and this is the area of the board that the VGA out uses on that model.

Fan connector placement is also good on the 945P, with the system fan header placed at the bottom of the board. Interestingly there is a header for a NB fan should you choose to use one on top of the MSI cooling.

Finally on the layout of the board we have the power connectors, the 945P is fully compatible with older and newer styles of PSU’s. Ideally for a top spec Intel system you’ll want a PSU with a 2x12 main connector and a 2x4 CPU power connector though if you don’t have such a PSU MSI have got your back. The 945P Neo allows you to run the system with a 2x10 main connector 2x2 CPU power connector with the aid of a 4 pin Molex connector which is located just above the PCI-e 16x slot.

What you can’t see…

There are several specifications of the 945P Neo Platinum which are worth mentioning. First of all, unlike the 925 chipset the 945 fully supports DDR2 667 and several brands of sticks we tested worked flawlessly in the board. Next up is the support of Dual Core and 1066fsb CPU’s as well as 64bit support - some of which was also lacking from the 925 chipset. You also have GB LAN over PCI Express, DTS 7.1 audio which is the only audio system on the consumer market to provide 7 discrete audio channels, and the board fully supports SATA2 raid. So current and future technologies are well catered for and should keep even the most ardent enthusiast happy for quite some time.

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