Test System

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz (9.5x333MHz)

Memory: 2x 1GB DDR2-1186 Geil (Supplied by Geil)

Hard Disk: 500GB Western Digital SE16 (Supplied by Western Digital)

Graphics Card: MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (Supplied by MSI)

Cooling: GIGABYTE 3D Galaxy II (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1

Drivers: Intel INF 8.2.0.1001, Forceware 173.14.05

For our comparison today, we are pitting the MSI P45 Platinum against our oldest but most impressive P35 board we have, GIGABYTE's P35 DQ6. Both are based on DDR2 memory which make these systems equally matched apart from the change in chipset.

For the stock settings, we ran with the CPU at its stock FSB and CPU ratio along with a memory setup of DDR2-800 which is the highest official DDR2 speed supported by the P45 and P35 chipsets.

Overclocking was done with the CPU ratio set back to 6x and the highest FSB obtained with a memory ratio of 1:1 to prevent both the CPU and memory being the bottleneck. Our MSI board managed to hit 504MHz whilst the P35 runs at 511MHz.

EVEREST Ultimate Edition

Version and / or Patch Used: 2006

Developer Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Product Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Buy It Here

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.

Pressing into the memory bandwidth, the MSI P45 Platinum's new chipset manages to just outperform the P35 at stock speeds. Despite a slightly slower FSB, the P45's memory optimizations manage to keep it in front; a very impressive result here.