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(Image from Oz Hardare)

Oz Hardare take a look at this board for us:

Having just completed a review of the ASUS P5KR last week, I am a bit taken back by the similarities I am finding on the MSI P35 Platinum. Yes I know they’re both based on the P35 chipset, but it goes further than that. The included features of the 2 boards are extremely similar, and yet the MSI version is almost AU$60 more expensive, so as ASUS boards aren’t generally the cheapest on the market, the question has to be asked of what this MSI board has to demand such a price premium, hopefully we’ll be able to shed some light through this review.

Read the full review at Oz Hardware :

The P35 Platinum (aka – MS-7345) uses Intel’s P35 Northbridge chipset coupled with the older but more common DDR2 memory, so it will be ideally suited for people upgrading their old boards or building a system on a budget. Working alongside the P35 Northbridge is Intel’s ICH9R Southbridge chipset, and being that it is the ‘R’ version, we get RAID functionality on the included SATA ports (RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10), as well as eSATA ports, a dozen USB2.0 ports and built-in High Definition Audio codec.

So far it seems to have a lot of the basic features you’d want from a motherboard at the higher end of the market. The full specs of the P35 Platinum are listed below:

• LGA775 CPU Platform (Support for Core 2 Duo/Quad/Extreme, Pentium D, Pentium 4 CPUs)
• 800/1066/1333MHz CPU Front Side Bus Support
• Intel P35 Northbridge/iCH9R Southbridge Chipset
• DDR2 667/800/1066MHz Dual Channel Memory – 4 x Slots, 8GB Max Total (800Mhz max native support by chipset)
• 7 x SATA-II Ports (2 x External/eSATA) – 4 Internal + 2 eSATA from Southbridge, 1 from addtional Marvell Controller
• 12 x USB2.0 Ports (6 on Back Panel, 6 by header on motherboard)
• 2 x PS/2 Ports – Keyboard/Mouse
• 2 x PCI-Express x16 Slots (One Supports x16, other supports x4 or x1 modes) – Crossfire Compatible
• 2 x PCI-Express x1 Slots, 2 x PCI 2.3 Slots
• 2 x Firewire400 Ports (1 x Rear Panel, 1 x Motherboard header)
• 8-Channel Audio w. Optical S/PDIF output
• 1 x GigLAN Port
• 1 x ATA-133 Connector, 1 x FDD Connector, 1 x Serial Port Header, 5 x Aux Fan Connectors
• 12” x 9.6” ATX Form Factor

When you take a look at the specs listed above, you can see that they’re almost identical to the (significantly cheaper) ASUS P5KR motherboard with only a few minor differences, such as an Optical Audio out instead of a Coax Digital, an extra eSATA port, the inclusion of a PS/2 mouse port and a couple of extra fan headers, so again we must ask – why the big price difference?