975X Platinum V2.0

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=746

This board looks good(although i've heard bad reports from the v1.0 board)

Msi boards are always pretty cheap, and the 975 chipset is good. The thing with msi is that u have to wait for a few bios updates before they start to show their potential.

Anyone with this board, or planning to buy this board, please give ur thoughts and results.

could it be that nobody gives a cr@p about msi? I know there has been some horror stories, but this is crazy.

They do have a newer upgrade, the "power up edition", any1 know anything about it?

are everyone against msi this bad???

The 975x Platinum Powerup is exactly what Im waiting for to put my x6800 on but unfortunately nobody has any info on when this board might be released. Its already out in taiwan but not even listed on the U.S site yet. Im really hoping it will follow within a month of Conroe release otherwise im going to have to wait a long long time with my parts collecting dust or get a board that I dont really want to begin with....

Personally I have not heared of any "horror stories" so please do share but ya they are deffinately past the 1.0 point cuz Coolaler over at xtremesystems reviewed this board a couple weeks ago with rev 2.1 and an x6800 and said that the board was awesome for the conroes.

There were some bad voltage and overclocking stories from the v1.0 board, but i also saw the review from coolaler, and this really does look like a good board. Googled for prices and reviews, looks like this is gonna be a expensive board, $320 i think it was. But it does look good. lets hope it arrives soon.

Good news the board is arriving very soon! It got listed on the US and Canada Msi site the other day, and I contacted Msi Canada and they told me it will be available next week. Woot!!

Do you think this is the V2 Power Up edition?

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=BA22975

My last couple boards have been MSI and their customer service is pretty decent so I'd like to go with them again. But I haven't seen any real FSB results from anything but Giga and Asus boards. Both of which have early revision issues it seems.

Memory Dividers, Raid problems, bad layouts, out of date bios, etc, etc.

The price is also very nice, at $175 for a high end 975x board.

I doubt it, they would prolly say "power up edition" & i heard that the powerup edition was gonna be almost $300. Coolaler has gotten some crazy clocks on it. that board will rock, but i bot too expensive for me.

Some of us mobo watchers have this one in mind, no doubt.
One of XS's cpu benchers has had amazing results with his, but if he isn't cherry picking hardware I dont know who is (he is running the fastest C2D on record right now)

btw.. this mobo isnt going to be cheap
thats why I say wait for retail results.

Here's the scoop. Only the rev. 2 PCB supports Core 2 Duo. Coolaler has had amazing results with this MB and Core 2 Duo. I wouldn't order it unless you know for sure it supports Core 2 Duo.

NB silicon(975X) is like a CPU in that some can go higher then others.

Core 2 Extreme said:

The 975x Platinum Powerup is exactly what Im waiting for to put my x6800 on but unfortunately nobody has any info on when this board might be released. Its already out in taiwan but not even listed on the U.S site yet. Im really hoping it will follow within a month of Conroe release otherwise im going to have to wait a long long time with my parts collecting dust or get a board that I dont really want to begin with....

Personally I have not heared of any "horror stories" so please do share but ya they are deffinately past the 1.0 point cuz Coolaler over at xtremesystems reviewed this board a couple weeks ago with rev 2.1 and an x6800 and said that the board was awesome for the conroes.

Click to expand...

If it's out in Taiwan I can probably get it here in France if you're interested. I live five minutes away from a street with 259 Taiwaneese computer shops. All Taiwan made motherboards are currently in stock from what I've seen...

Just an FYI this board was put on newegg today for $230

Thats pretty sweet, which doesn't make it that expensive. I wpuld still just wait for reviews and hands on experiences at the forum.

I have this mobo with a retail e6700 and some Patriot pc8000 XBLK. Will post results Tues.

greenmaji said:

Some of us mobo watchers have this one in mind, no doubt.
One of XS's cpu benchers has had amazing results with his, but if he isn't cherry picking hardware I dont know who is (he is running the fastest C2D on record right now)

btw.. this mobo isnt going to be cheap
thats why I say wait for retail results.

Click to expand...

That's why I went with the Asrock. I couldn't just pull the trigger for 150-200 bucks this month and have the REAL motherboards come out next month. They have to at least have some decent bioses out for the existing boards.

I got a v2.0 board from ewiz along with my E6400. It was $190, and was specifically called out as v2.0, get the MSI part number before ordering from anywhere that doesn't call out the revision.

MSI is notorious for this, it is a double edged sword. The good side is they are truly continuously updating their products, the bad thing is they use these dang revision numbers rather than releasing the product under a new PN.

I went with MSI because I have used their MB's in the last 4 systems I have built, and though I haven't been an avid overclocker, they have always had a good features/price/hardware kit ratio, and their liveupdate (update bios, drivers, etc.) utility was always very good to me. Previous to them I had (both top of the line) Asus and Gigabyte fail on me. I know this says NOTHING statistically of brand reliability, it is just my personal experience, and helps explain why I like MSI, since many people don't seem to. Quite frankly I have also had good luck with thier video cards, as they tend to be on the cheap end for a given product reference design, a little flashy, and good software support.

Anyways, I have the board running my retail E6400 (2.13 base) at 2.93GHz on the stock cooler, with NO voltage adjustments to the core. I did step my ram up to 1.9 but in all honestly I'm not even sure this was necessary. Only changed the memory setting to 533MHz and then OC'd with FSB changes. I'm sorry I am not an avid overclocker so I can't report on how good this board is vs. an Asus, but I am quite happy with it. The reasons I didn't end up above 2.93 are listed at the end.

Temps reported by the MSI software are ~42 idle, ~48 running dual prime95. These seem to be on the high end of those reporting, but at the same time all of the temp reporting software hasn't really been updated for the core 2's, so I think there is a lot of skewed numbers making it out, BIOS vs. actual readings, etc. All I know is at full load the heatsink itself is barely warm, so the MSI software might actually be reporting a little high.

Here is my shortie review:

Hardware:
- Antec 420 truepower (carry over, needed 24pin & SATA adapters)
- MSI 975x Plat Rev 002 (ewiz.com, $190 ish)
- Retail E6400, stock cooler, artic silver 5 (ewiz.com, $200ish)
- Corsair 1gbx2, 5-5-5-12 (newegg.com, $130 AR)
- ATI 1900GT/256mb (Best Buy of all places, $190 w/coupon)
- 160gig Raptor / 250gig WD (Dell @ $150 / old system drive)
- Dual Pioneer DVDRW Drives ($40 ea @ newegg.com)
- Creative XFi sound card (Best Buy again, $70 w/coupon)
- 120mm intake/exit fans, 80mm side panel intake, 40mm chipset fan
- Zalman cooler/PCI slot fan coming for the ATI card...

Good things:
- Relatively low cost for a 975x board
- Crossfire ready (though I'll probably never use it)
- OC stability/tunings seem good with the v2.0 board
- Supports up to 4 IDE devices (this was important to me, saved me the hassle of using a seperate, messy, ATA card)
- MSI liveupdate software is very good (imho)
- MSI support with BIOS updates, etc., historically has been good to me
- Good, attractive layout, fair enough hardware bundle
- There is an MSI utility to monitor temps/fans/frequencies. It is supposed to support OC adjustments from Windows but I have not had any luck with that yet. But it is nice to have a proprietary hardware monitor rather than wait for the third party things to be updated, and this should be improved with software/Bios updates.

Negs
- Chipset cooler is just a heatsink. I'm not sure how hot these are supposed to get, but mine seemed very hot, too hot to touch (but not sizzling) for more than a second or two, so I put a fan on it. With the fan you can touch it. Maybe the hotness is normal, but I've read at least some MSI 939 boards had chipset heat problems, so I plopped a fan on it just to be safe.
- There seems to be a small bios issue with windows restarting on higher overclocks. Anything over 2.5-2.6GHz and the PC won't restart normally. Shut down, and cold start up works, but the windows restart hangs. So for now I have the special instructions of not being able to use a plain restart. Annoying, but no biggie.

Again, I know very little of overclocking, so I'm not sure what the limits would be. My constraints were:

- No voltage adjustment to the core
- Stock cooler w/ temps at load always under 50C
- No graphics corruption
- Dual prime95, no errors, no temps above 50C

At 3.0-3.1GHz the windows booting screen started glitching a little, through everything in Windows itself was perfectly fine, and my temps were the same. I'm not sure if this matters or not but it bugged me, so I backed off to 2.93GHz. E6800 speeds out of my $200 E6400 is perfectly satisfying to me, the video card is now what is holding me back, and the thing just flies overall. Coming from an old 2.66 Northwood (mildly OC'd to 2.9) this is heaven, and I am quite happy.

Now I just have to deal with that easy bake oven of a video card I've got. Thing idles at 70C and spikes to 95C, which appearently is perfectly "normal" for these cards. Once I get my PC's up and running I like to use them trouble free (stability is very important to me) so I've got a Zalman cooler coming for that card, which should also take that jet engine little fan out of my noise floor.

i just got the rig in my sig booted and running. set it to the 3GHz its at and i dont know if ill try to go alot higher, dont really need to yet. was playing oblivion for an hour on max settings with no trouble.

im thinking about putting an old GPU fan on the chipset to help keep it cool. will see how it goes.

There is a big thread over at XS on this mobo. People are hitting the lower 400's FSB with some slight tweaks here and there. Chipset cooling seems to help. I will be getting mine in a few days and will be using it to OC my 805D until I can afford a c2d.

The general consensus is that this is a good board. You aren't going to get as high of an OC as the asus or d3 boards (965 chipset), but a bios revision should improve the situation.

The vdrop is pretty good on these boards despite not having a 8phase power setup, somewhere around .03.

I went with this board for the following reasons.

1) price - I snagged it for $179 from the egg.
2) 2 PCI slots and 2 ATA ports. For some reason ATA and PCI are going bye bye. I have an old but good 160gig drive, and a DVD burner + DVD rom drive that I cannot part with. I have an audigy2 and a TV tuner I cannot part with. Most other boards didn't have both 2PCI and 2 ATA ports
3) Crossfire/SLI (with hacked drivers and hopefully nvidia drivers soon). I have 2x7900gt's, and I don't want to go with a nvidia chipset due to them sucking at OCing. People are having good results with the hacked SLI drivers and this board

The main problem people are having is having to cold boot at high settings like mentioned above. This should be resolved with a BIOS update (crosses fingers). I am going to be Vcore limited with the 805d on this board. 1.58 is the max you can get. I doubt this will change with BIOS updates, but for those lucky enough to have a c2d chip this shouldn't be a HUGE problem.

I'll report back when I get mine in. Hopefully MSI is reading some forums and checking for these cold boot issues.

Im going to check the temp of my chipset heatsink with the OC in my sig after oblivion on high for an hour. then ill get my fan put on it (stock fan off the heatsink from retail 9800pro) and test it again to see if it helps much. im not at a crazy OC and the heatsink is not fun to touch already.

also could someone fill me in on where the XS site is? dont think ive ever been there. links would be good

Here ya go

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=110054

y0bailey said:

I'll report back when I get mine in...

Click to expand...

Sooooooo, whaddya think?