MSI X58 Platinum Motherboard

Test Setup
 

To ensure that all reviews on Overclock3D are fair, consistent and unbiased, a standard set of hardware and software is used whenever possible during the comparative testing of two or more products. The configuration used in this review can be seen below: 


 

During the testing of the setup above, special care was taken to ensure that the BIOS settings used matched whenever possible. A fresh install of Windows Vista was also used before the benchmarking began, with a full defrag of the hard drive once all the drivers and software were installed, preventing any possible performance issues due to leftover drivers from the previous motherboard installations. For the 3DMark and gaming tests a single card configuration was used.

To guarantee a broad range of results, the following benchmark utilities were used:


Synthetic CPU Test
• Sisoft Sandra 2009
• PassMark CPU test
• SuperPI 1m, 8m, 32m

Memory Test
• Sisoft Sandra 2009
• Everest 4.60

File Compression & Encoding
• Sisoft Sandra 2009
• 7-Zip File Compression
• River Past ViMark

Disk I/O Performance
• HDTach 3.0.4.0
• Sisoft Sandra 2009

3D / Rendering Benchmarks
• Cinebench 10
• 3DMark 05
• 3DMark 06
• 3DMark Vantage

3D Games
• Crysis
• Far Cry 2
• Company of Heroes

Overall System Performance
• PCMark Vantage

Power Consumption

Power consumption was measured at the socket using a plug-in mains power and energy monitor. Idle readings were taken after 5 minutes in Windows. Load readings were taken during a run of 3DMark Vantage.


 

At idle, it is clear that the Asus board uses less power than the MSI Platinum X58 but things even out once the boards are put under stress. No software or BIOS power saving features were used during the testing which may or may not improve things further should you choose to install them. We took the readings under a clean environment with only the bare minimum of drivers and Vista updates installed.
 

Overclocking

Using a respectable Vcore of 1.45v, the remainder of BIOS voltage settings were left in their stock state to ensure equality throughout the testing.

Overclock
Sadly, the maximum overclock I could attain with the MSI Platinum was lower than expected with a maximum Bclk value of 193 which also gave us our maximum overclock of 3850. Anything over this amount resulted in a BSOD on boot sequence which was strange, as the settings above were stable within Windows. No amount of tweaking the dividers and multipliers would improve the situation and so after a couple of hours fiddling with the settings I finally admitted defeat and moved on.

Let’s take a look at how the MSI Platinum performs in our benchmarking section..