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See, he looks intimidating, but in real life he's like:
"Hi, you wanna buy some Girl Scout Cookies?"
He's actually a really nice guy. Alright, you're looking at the
MSI P45D3 Platinum Motherboard. Now this is a kind of a high-end P45 motherboard.
It's got a lot of great features, especially for overclocking.
MSI pretty much went to town with this two face power for your memory
and your northbridge for overclocking. All your Socket 775 CPUs
whether they be the Core 2 Quads, or the Core 2 Extremes,
or the Core 2 Duos, they will do up to 1600 MHz frontside bus.
And, the memory supported on this board right here,
that's up to 2000 MHz. It'll take your 2000 MHz DDR 3 memory.
Or it will take 1600, 1800, 1333, 1066, you name it.
It'll all work there in a dual channel configuration, up to 8 GB of memory.
Now, let's talk about what comes on this board. Let me start off by showing you
pretty much your connectors on the back. It's always pretty important.
PS2s, you have both for your keyboard and for your mouse.
You have four USB 2.0s over here, as well as a couple more over here.
This is your Gigabit Ethernet. Now, right here, this is very, very nice on-board audio.
This almost means you don't need to get a sound card,
if you're really into audio. It's got a great signal to noise ratio.
And it's 7.1 channel. It's using the ELC888 codec from Adaptec.
So very, very nice sound. Again, Gigabit Ethernet and then also,
back over here now, I just want to point out that you do have the very important
eSATA, as well as the Clear CMOS button. So, if you overclock too far
you can reset all your bio settings, right there.
You have your S/PDIF Optical Output for your audio right there.
So, that's one cable. You use a Toslink Cable to get to your surround sound receiver,
or whatever you're using. And you have your Firewire, right there,
which is very, very important to have. Now, let's talk about the slots
on this board because there are quite a few. That's one of the things that make this board
a little bit different, is that you get two PCI Expres x16 2.0 slots.
Which, if you run both of them, in a CrossFire set up,
you would be using x8 and x8 electronically.
The P45 chipset is limited in to how many lanes it can actually input.
So, you're gonna go x8, x8. But, if you're using PCI Express 2.0
video cards, it doesn't really matter because you're getting double
the bandwidth anyway. You won't lose too much performance.
Now, you also have these two PCI Express x1s.
And, you have two PCI standards, which are the 2.2's.
Now let's talk a little bit about headers because this board has a ton of headers.
If you need USB, right up your alley. Check this out.
This is one USB header, two USB header, three USB header.
And they also have headers for FireWire and for your HD audio over here.
So you have tons of connectivity. Now let's say you wanna add a lot of
hard drives. Well, that's not going to be a problem either.
Because as you can see you have 6 hard drives SATA ports right here,
for your hard drives, and you have an additional two right there.
So, pretty much these are running off separate controllers.
These will be running your OS if you're going to be doing a RAID 0 array.
That's their proprietary controller on here.
Or, you can still run RAID 0, 1, 0 + 1, and 5
through any one of these. In the end you're not going to have
a huge performance difference, but this doesn't require any work.
You plug in two drives. You set it up to RAID 0, and it's going to boot up
right off the bat. You also have an IDE, right there,
in case you have some old hard drive that you want to transfer some old data off.
You also have your floppy disk connector, right here, which I really hope nobody uses.
It's just there. It's a legacy item. It's there for a reason, but I don't know
what that reason is. 24-pin motherboard connector,
so make sure you have the right power supply
that you need to use this board. And let's talk a little bit about hardware.
Because this board has incredible hardware. Now, as far as cooling goes,
you can see there is definitely cooling. It's all integrated with heat pipes.
There's actually two heat pipes coming from the southbridge
all the way up to the northbridge where it comes to this really weird looking,
I don't know how to describe it, northbridge cooler, that's very, very,
very brass and copper. Actually, I'm sorry, copper, kinda sharp, actually.
It's a little dangerous there. But it does do an excellent job
of keeping the heat down. And, you're going to see that
even the two heat pipes came in, three come out,
and come over here to your MOSFET, which are lower RDSON MOSFET.
And up here, as well. Like I said, you do have two stages of power
for your motherboard and your northbridge.
So, that's going to help you overclock just a little bit higher
when you overclock. When you increase the voltages to your northbridge,
it's going to give you a little bit more stable power.
And if you're really running those voltages very high,
that's gonna help you out a lot. Besides that, everything else is incredible.
You have solid state capacitors on the board.
Polymer, I'm sorry, Ferrite Core Chokes. And everything else seems to be
absolutely incredible. So the MSI P45D3 Motherboard from MSI,
which stands for... - Micro Star International.
Good job Alfred!
And before I let you guys go I'm gonna give you a quick perusal.
Let me show you what you got in the box. First of all,
once of my favorites. Input/output shield.
Painted, pretty decent. You also get this. This is kinda cool.
You get a Firewire and USB 2.0 up the back. So, you have all these headers,
if your front panel has no use for them, or you have nowhere to put them,
you can add these on to the back. You get these connectors from MSI,
which are great, very useful. You plug in your front panel connectors,
and your audio and your USB into these first.
And then you plug these into the board. That saves you some finger crunching.
You got these random cables, which are Floppy ribbon cables
and floppy IDE cables. No one uses those. You get four SATA cables,
and then you get two of these Molex to SATA cables,
which are right there. And those are going to be useful if you have an older power supply,
and you don't want to buy a new one. And finally, an SLI bridge. I'm sorry, a CrossFire bridge.
You're not going to get a three way CrossFire bridge because you would
never use it on a P45 board. But this is for your CrossFire.
So you want to do a couple 4850's, a couple 4870's,
or even a couple a couple 4870 X2's.
This is right up your alley. This is exactly what you're going to use.
So, a good amount of stuff in the box, as well. That rounds out the package for
the MSI P45D3 Platinum Motherboard. If you have any questions on it,
Email me right here, and I'll see you guys next time.
For more information on the MSI P45D3 Platinum Intel P45 Chipset Motherboard,
type in: M452-6041
into the search engine of any of these major retailers.
For Computer TV, I'm Albert.
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