Most of the boards in this comparison sacrifice either features or connectors in an attempt to keep cost reasonable, but what happens when a company wants to offer everything for a modest price increase? MSI provides an answer in its P6N SLI Platinum.

Features Overview

Packing a mid-priced board with features isn't likely to result in a "clean, efficient" design, but careful planning allowed MSI to fit the majority of these into logical locations. It's not like the company added unwanted extra components: Instead, it kept all the expected features and connectors that other companies often remove to maintain low cost.

The first middle road taken by MSI is its four-phase voltage regulator, similar to those found in the ECS and Abit samples. By comparison, the P5N-E SLI has only three phases, while the Gigabyte provides six. Overclocking stability tests will prove this design's ultimate worth.

Stepping above most of the competition is MSI's selection of solid capacitors in all locations on this board, a move towards stability and longevity matched only by Gigabyte in this comparison.

Only six of the possible seven slot positions are useful, but the slot MSI eliminated would often be blocked by a graphics card cooler anyway. One PCI-Express x1 and three PCI slots take care of the majority of configuration needs, while the two PCI-Express x16 slots can be set to one x16 pathway or two x8 pathways via a selector card between them.

Both Ultra ATA connectors are located above the center of the P6N SLI Platinum's leading edge for easy cable routing to upper drive bays, and four Serial ATA connectors are lined up just above the lower graphics card slot so as to fit between the oversized coolers of two large graphics cards. The 24-pin ATX power connector's upper front edge location is also nearly ideal for use in traditional tower case designs.

Cable routing difficulties include a floppy and front panel cable connectors near the front and rear of the bottom edge and an 8-pin ATX12V header below the rear corner of the CPU cooler location. The floppy connector location is still a bit better than three of the other boards in this comparison, though the front panel audio connector's extremely remote placement is matched by only one. The ATX12V connector might be easier to reach for cases that have the power supply beneath the board, but will force builders using traditional cases to rout the cable over or around the CPU cooler.

Heatpipes join the Southbridge, Northbridge, and a partial VRM sink, allowing various CPU coolers to be somewhat effective at reducing heat in an already good design. Builders needing additional chipset cooling will find an add-on Northbridge fan in the box.

The P6N SLI Platinum keeps most of the useful controllers and rear panel ports, using the midrange ALC888 codec rather than the old ALC883 found on a few others. Connected to five of the needed six analog audio jacks, 7.1-channel analog configurations will limit the fifth jack to either Microphone or Line-In functions, not both. MSI puts the digital optical audio output where the sixth analog connection might have gone on other motherboards.

The back panel also features a digital coaxial audio output, eSATA, IEEE-1394 FireWire, RJ-45 network and four USB 2.0 ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports and a parallel port.