Preview - MSI P45 "Eaglelake" Motherboards
With Intel's X48 chipsets trickling in retail, it's almost time for the mainstream P45 motherboards to follow suit. All the major vendors are preparing for their upcoming P45 boards and we managed to snag a couple of demo units from MSI for a sneak preview.
The Coming of the Eagle
Keeping pace with its regular processor releases, Intel has so far managed to churn out the chipsets to support them. Last year saw the appearance of the '3-series' chipsets, from the lower and mainstream G33 and P35 to the enthusiast oriented X38, all of which were ready for Intel's 45nm dual and quad-core processors (Wolfdale and Yolkfield). However, before the market had settled on these new boards, Intel was preparing for the launch of its enthusiast chipset follow-up, the X48, which became available earlier this year and on paper, is really a marginal, official increase of the FSB to 1600MHz.
Now that the '4-series' is out of the bag, the time has come for the mainstream equivalents to make their debuts. You can expect these boards to be available in the late-May to June time frame. Unlike the X48 chipsets, there are more substantial updates on these upcoming P45 motherboards, though we doubt users will be rushing to upgrade just yet. Basically, the new P45 boards now support PCI Express 2.0 to keep abreast of developments in graphics. The official FSB predictably gets a boost to 1600MHz while memory support gets pushed up to DDR3-1333MHz. Similar to the P35, vendors get to decide if they want DDR2 or DDR3 memory support, though with Nehalem on the far horizon, the next chipset iteration after the P45 will likely drop DDR2. The Southbridge now uses the new ICH10 (and as usual, the RAID capable ICH10R variant is also available), while CrossFireX support (up to 8x lanes for each PCIe graphics slot) is also implemented.
MSI sent us some engineering samples of its higher end P45 motherboards, the Diamond and Platinum versions and we have some interesting close up shots of these two boards, featuring their new heatsinks for the Northbridge. Do note that the motherboards shown in this preview article are engineering samples and demo units. Final specifications may differ for the retail versions, though the feature list should be mostly intact.
The MSI P45 Diamond
Starting off, we have the MSI P45 Diamond, which caught our eye with a new Circu-Pipe Liquid heatsink that is supposed to be bundled with a water cooling solution at retail.
This Diamond is DDR3 compatible only and comes with dual Gigabit Ethernet and there's even a Creative X-Fi add-on card for audio (not included in our demo unit).
Along with its eight USB2.0 ports and dual Ethernet connectors, the Diamond also has two eSATA ports and a FireWire port.
The MSI P45 Diamond Revealed
MSI's Circu-Pipe Liquid heatsink found on the P45 Diamond. Notice that some components seem to be missing? The retail version will be sold with a water cooling solution that has a module external of the chassis in order to minimize liquid leakage.
With MSI using highly conductive polymerized capacitors (Hi-c cap), there should be no issues with the height of capacitors near the CPU socket.
These short, small gray and white highly conductive polymerized capacitors are claimed by MSI to be the next evolution in capacitors, with even longer life span and overvoltage/overclocking tolerance than solid capacitors. They can also be found in newer motherboards from MSI, like the K9N2 Diamond.
There are six SATA 3.0Gbps ports along with 2 SATA RAID. The included IDE port is courtesy of a third party IC, in this case, a JMicron JMB363.
Like some other motherboards, there are buttons on the Diamond for power on/off and reset. You can also see the JMicron controller chip here on the left.
There are two PCIe 2.0 x 16 slots, 2 PCIe x 1 slot and two PCI slots. The PCIe x 1 slot on the right does seem a bit too close to the Circu-Pipe Liquid heatsink.
This ASIC is responsible for the hardware monitoring (voltages, temperatures) and the tweaks like fan speed and voltage adjustments.
The MSI P45 Platinum Series
With a new Circu-Pipe heatsink and MSI enhancements like the DrMOS feature prominently displayed on the board, MSI has no shortage of features on its P45 Platinum series of motherboards, which comes in either DDR2 or DDR3 flavors. DrMOS for instance, promises up improvements in energy efficiency and lower power consumption over conventional MOSFETs.
MSI has two Platinum P45 boards, one with DDR2 (P45 Platinum) and the other with DDR3 support (P45D3 Platinum).
We'll be looking at the DDR3 version, though with the exception of the DRAM modules, both boards are exactly the same.
The MSI P45D3 Platinum comes with six USB2.0 ports, 1 eSATA and since it has HD audio onboard, the usual audio I/O. There's also only one Ethernet port instead of the two on the Diamond. Note the heatsink jutting to the rear I/O panel area - the design takes advantage of cooler air outside the system to further cool the heat pipe.
After the rollercoaster ride that was the original Circu-Pipe, MSI now has the second version, Circu-Pipe 2 on its P45 Platinum boards. With up to five separate heat pipes and their respective set of fins, MSI is touting temperatures of around 35 degrees Celsius under load. We'll report on this aspect as soon as we get down to testing them.
There's no polymer capacitors on the Platinum but solid capacitors are fine with us. Despite the seemingly close proximity of the capacitors to the socket, there's still ample space surrounding the socket for exotic heatsinks (if they've the height clearance).
As you can see, there are more than sufficient SATA ports for most users.
MSI has these OC jumpers which allow overclockers to change their ratio tables for optimal overclocking. However, we are inclined to prefer a wholly BIOS solution for this, especially since a large, dual slot graphics card (GeForce 9800 GX2) would likely make it quite difficult to reach these jumpers.
The same Realtek RTL8111C Ethernet chip is found on both Diamond and Platinum boards.
There's HD Audio onboard the Platinum boards and its provided by this popular Realtek ALC888 codec.
Like the Diamond, these handy red buttons for Power and Reset are also found on the Platinum series.
The layout is slightly changed from the Diamond but the same number of expansion slots
are present. CrossFireX is supported, with the two PCIe x 16 lanes splitting into two 8x lanes in such a scenario.
And with that, we have looked through some of the upcoming Intel P45 models from MSI. We'll be doing the proper reviews once they are ready for retail so keep an eye out on this page at www.hardwarezone.com.
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