MSI Bearlake MBO's review - P35 Platinum
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 11 May 2007

MSI P35 Platinum is quite an interesting motherboard, if we might add. Let's check out the layout first and then talk about bundle and everything related. The fist thing you immediately notice on this motherboard is the weird-looking cooling solution. We call this cooling a Double Rollercoaster Edition and this "weird" came from "weird" to "cool" in two days I've been "hanging out" with this motherboard. What's even more important, overall solution is completely passive, so don't expect to have any fans to cool down this motherboard because - quite frankly - they're not needed. We always appericiate passive cooled products and this is a very nice big plus for the motherboard.

The layout itself is very logical and simple - four DDR2 slots located on the right side of the Socket 775 that can keep Core 2 Duo's and Core 2 Quads pretty happy. This is actually the first motherboard in a long time that has odd number of Serial ATA ports. Two PCI slots, a couple of PCI-Express's and three PCI-E x4 slots are there for possible future upgrades.

We had some problems with memory compatibility and restart from BIOS procedure which is something normal for a sample product with unfinished BIOS. We consider these to be small glitches since new BIOSes are on the way so this will be taken care of before you manage to buy the motherboard in the store.