MSI P965 Platinum Motherboard (Intel Core 2 Extreme/Core 2 Duo/Pentium EE/Pentium, Socket T, P965, ATX, 8GB DDR2, 1066MHz)

User Reviews for MSI P965 Platinum Motherboard (Intel Core 2 Extreme/Core 2 Duo/Pentium EE/Pentium, Socket T, P965, ATX, 8GB DDR2, 1066MHz)

• Reviewed by: Supercop007

  Duration of ownership:

  Strengths: Reasonable price for a full-featured P965 Intel Chipset motherboard, Firewire and Parallel ports are a plus, easy to set-up.

  Weaknesses: When using sleep mode in Microsoft Vista, the keyboard and mouse may work upon resuming.

  Overall Evaluation: After using the MSI P965 Platinum Motherboard for a few months, I've found that it is very stable and easy to work with. The onboard features like firewire and parallel ports were very useful since I still use them for my camcorder and printer. The only problem I ran into early on was that the mouse and keyboard ceased to work after resuming from sleep mode in Vista. However this may partly be contributed to the fact that once I turned sleep mode off my problem went away.I'm not an overclocker so I can't comment on how well it does in comparison to other motherboards, but from a tools point of view, MSI provides easy access to pushing more MHZ out of your CPU if you have little or no knowledge in fiddling with the BIOS.Overall I would recommend this product, although it doesn't get the community support of Gigabyte's DS3 board or Asus' P5B Deluxe board. It's really a matter of which onboard features you like.
• Reviewed by: lionfan

  Duration of ownership:

  Strengths: 10 USB ports, solid construction, Gigabit LAN, Firewire, 7.1 surround sound

  Weaknesses: BIOS, some connections are difficult to access

  Overall Evaluation: First off, I recommend that you read the product manual, and spend some time on the MSI International(taiwan web site)forums reading posts regarding this board. There is a lot of valuable information regarding updated drivers and fixes to problems others have had that allow you to set this board up relatively problem free. Basically if you want to slip stream your installation with the latest drivers, many problems will be solved during OS installation. Definitely get the latest BIOS as soon as possible. MSI has never had the friendliest of BIOS, so if you are new to O.C.. there are probably better MOBO alternatives. All in all this is a basic board that includes all the features an average user would want. There is a single LAN port, but it is Gigabit for the latest networking speed, plenty of USB and SATA ports, and supports crossfire. For me, a decent overclock can be had on an E4300 using Kingston Value RAM. There have been problems reported with the E6xxx series achieving high FSB, but the E4xx processors should O.C. with little effort.