Sneak peak at MSI's P45 motherboards

Posted at: 1:32am 15th May 2008 by Phil Hartup high up in the Alps

With its new range of P45 motherboards MSI is trying thinking green and also embracing overclockers

With the P45 chipset promising to see the last ride of Intel's Socket 775 CPUs, motherboard manufacturers are seeing it as extremely important - as the last and hopefully best of their kind, P45 boards will have, they believe, a long life, and as such, getting the design right is crucial.

MSI has revealed details of its upcoming P45 products, and is aiming to cover all their bases with a line of motherboards that appeal to both tree hugging Eco-Warriors and hardcore overclockers.

This two pronged assault at what would appear to be diametrically opposed ends of the market stems firstly from the power system the new boards will use. With earlier boards groups of different MOSFETs handled each power phase; these disparate groups have now been replaced with single chips which are easier to cool and take up less space. MSI is also promising that these will consime less power.

Keeping the chipset cool and running effectively without having to resort to noisy, power demanding fans is also something that MSI have worked on. The Circupipe cooling system on the P45 Platinum we saw was passive, using copper heatpipes and reasonably compact yet completely flamboyant heatsinks. Although it initially looked cumbersome and prone to obscuring the CPU socket, the firm showed the board with a large Zalman HSF cooler fitted to prove this wasn't the case - click on the picture in the top left to launch a gallery and see the pics.

The firm also showed off a P45 board, the P45 Diamond, which had a waterblock fitted to the northbridge, an idea first tried by Asus and now being explored by other motherboard manufacturers including Foxconn.

Beyond the special features the nuts and bolts have also been tightened up. MSI have said that they are opting for a higher grade of general component, such as capacitors, for this generation of boards in order to provide more stable voltage for more sustainable overclocking. Beyond this they have also gone to town on the BIOS - gone are the lamentable percentile voltage indicators, replaced with actual voltage levels, and also a host of other options have been opened up, from high precision RAM tweaking settings to detailed voltage controls with tighter increments. The long term plan with these firmware improvements is the implementation of EFI to replace the standard BIOS on P45 boards, although how compatible this will be with home systems remains to be seen.

Related: Our motherboard and BIOS design feature.