Both these mainboards now have been around for a few months and heavily reviewed by many sites. Today we are lucky to see both these boards in their new updated modified solutions sporting neat heatpipe cooling solutions to the north and south bridges.    We have at a later point compared the temperature differences between the standard MSI 975X Platinum PowerUp Edition against the modified edition of MSI 975X Platinum PowerUp Edition which arrived here. This will give you a good idea on how much more energy efficient and cooler the modified board really is.

One thing every concentrates upon is how do these mainboards perform with high speed memory and top end multimedia cards. The reviews of the boards with these cards have been very good. Countless numbers of 965 and 975 mainboards can be found in professional baseline workstations though many readers wanting to purchase these items have no idea to what level the whole system performs! Many of the biggest problems encountered by the SoHo and Semi professional within the professional arena who prefer to build their own systems is finding a good sound cost single solution mainboard for the studio user before moving upwards into the power end of Dual Opteron and Xeon configurations. Taking this into account we have today we have shown some good figures on what Intel’s current offering of the new E6700 CPU has to offer with a supply of Corsairs new Dominator DDR2 8500 memory.    A review on AMD offerings will follow very soon so that we all can see just how each camp truly performs and you can then make an informed choice to which way forward you wish to proceed.

Resounding stability and lack of acoustics are what the user needs and the system builds we have shown further on really do achieve these objectives. The fundamental basics of a good chassis, PSU and internal cooling devices are of a paramont importance. Skimp on these basics and this were a huge amount of problems can essentially occur. It does not cost tremendous amounts of monies as the cost of these peripherals has dropped dramatically in these last year. Therefore to increase longevity of your internal peripherals think carefully on build you need.

Hopefully today once you have seen the figures presented further on these mainboards and their accoutrements may just give you the reader an idea on what to use next. The rejuvenatation for both NVIDIA’s Quadro’s and AMD FireGL cards are nearing their yearly refreshes. With this in mind we have decided to do a run of what these new mainboards can do with the current Professional Cards in anticipation of the new cards turning up at some point in the not too distant future. To maintain fair play for each house, their professional graphic card will be shown individually on separate reviews, therefore when AMD and NVIDIA launch their cards you the reader can accurately compare each card refresh with its older version.  
As discussed earlier, each of these mainboards has been heavily covered so let’s just quickly look at the Key Features to each of these mainboards.

MSI 975X Platinum
PowerUp Edition

MSI 965 Platinum Edition

CPU Support

Chipset

• Intel® 975X Chipset
- Supports FSB 533/800/1066MHz.
- 2 PCI Express controllers in the MCH
   enable either 1 x 16 or 2 x 8 operation.
- Supports dual channel, DDR2 533 / 667
   /800.

• Intel® ICH7DH Chipset
- Hi-Speed USB (USB2.0) controller, 
  480Mb/sec, up to 8 ports.
- 4 SATAII ports with transfer rate up to
  3Gb/s.
- 1 channel Ultra ATA 100 bus master IDE
  controller.
- PCI Master v2.3, I/O APIC.
- ACPI 2.0 compliant.
- Serial ATA RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID
  0+1.
- Integrated AHCI controller.

• Intel® P965 Chipset
- Supports FSB 1066/800/533 MHz.
- Supports PCI Express x 16 graphics interface.
- Supports dual channel, DDR2 533/667/800

• Intel® ICH8R Chipset
- Hi-Speed USB (USB2.0) controller, 480Mb/sec,
   up to 10 ports.
- 6 SATAII ports with transfer rate up to 3Gb/s.
- PCI Master v2.3, I/O APIC.
- ACPI 2.0 compliant.
- Serial ATA RAID 0, RAID 1 RAID 5 and
   RAID 10.
- Integrated AHCI controller.

Main Memory

Slots

• Two PCI Express x16 slot. (supports PCI
   Express Bus specification v1.0a compliant)
- Supports into 2 x8 slot.
- Supports ATI® Crossfire™ technology.
• Two PCI Express x1 slots. (support PCI
   Express Bus specification v1.0a compliant)
• Two 32-bit v2.3 master PCI bus slots.
- One orange slot which supports 2 masters for   MSI special PCI function card (ex. wireless LAN and Bluetooth combo card).
- Support 3.3v/5v PCI bus interface.

• One PCI Express x16 slot. (supports PCI Express Bus specification v1.0a compliant)
• One PCI Express x4 slot. (The yellow one, support PCI Express Bus specification v1.0a compliant)
• The two slots above support ATI® CrossFire technology.
• Two PCI Express x1 slots. (support PCI Express Bus specification v1.0a compliant)
• Two 32-bit v2.3 master PCI bus slots. (support 3.3v/5v PCI bus interface)

On-Board IDE/SATA

• One Ultra DMA 66/100 IDE controllers integrated in ICH7DH and JMicron® JMB361.
- Supports PIO, Bus Master operation modes.
- Can connect up to four Ultra ATA drives.

• SATAII controller integrated in ICH7DH
- Up to 300MB/sec transfer speed.
- Can connect up to four SATAII devices.
- Supports AHCI controller with SATA RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1 (ICH7DH).

• JMicron® JMB361 chipest
- Supports RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD. (SATA 5 and IDE2)

• One Ultra DMA 66/100/133 IDE controller integrated in JMicron® JMB361.
- Supports PIO, Bus Master operation modes.
- Can connect up to two Ultra ATA drives.

• SATAII controller integrated in ICH8R/JMicron® JMB361
- Up to 300MB/sec transfer speed.
- Six SATAII ports by ICH8R.
- One SATAII port by JMicron® JMB361.
- Supports AHCI controller with SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 10 (ICH8R).

Audio

• Chip integrated by Realtek® AL882M
- Flexible 8-channel audio with jack sensing
- Compliant with Azalia 1.0 spec.

LAN

• Supports PCI Express LAN 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet by Intel 82573L

• Realtek® RTL8111B
- Supports 10/100/1000 Mb/s.
- PCI-Express interface.
- Supports ACPI Power Management.

IEEE1394

• VIA® 6308P chipset
- Supports up to two 1394 ports. (Rear panel x1, pinheader x1)
- Transfer rate is up to 400Mbps.

• VIA® 6308 chipset
- Supports up to two 1394 ports. (Rear panel x1, front x1)
- Transfer rate is up to 400Mbps.

With this complete lets look at the next page and a few of the pictures of each of the mainboards that have been sent here for review.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - MSI 975 and MSI 965 Mainboard Pictures
Page 3 - System Configurations, Software and Benchmarks Used
Page 4 - SiSoftware 2007 SP1- MSI 975X Platinum PowerUp Edition – Modified Mainboard
Page 5 - SiSoftware 2007 SP1- MSI 965X Platinum Edition – Modified Mainboard
**Page 6 - Hard Drive Tach 3.0.1.0 - Journalists Edition
Page 7 - PCMark 2005 Advanced with build 1.2.0 and 3D Mark 2006 Advanced with build 1.1.0
Page 8 - Autodesk® 3ds Max® 8 with SP3
Page 9 - Cinebench, SPEC Benchmarks and Conclusions