Hardware Early Look: MSI's P45 & nForce 780a mobos

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/04/18/early_look_msi_p45_and_nforce_780a_mobos/1

During our trip to China and Taiwan earlier this month, we paid a visit to MSI's headquarters in Taipei to see what the company is up to. Today, we've got pictures and thoughts on two of the company's newest motherboards - the P45 Platinum and K9N2 Diamond.

 

Stll waiting for a working 'intel' SLI based motherboard. I like the layouts of both the boards but i am a little scared about the picture below:



isn't the top heat pipe getting in the way of the PCI-E card?

 

The Thermalright Ultima 90 (which is by far not the biggest cooler avalaible) just barely fits on my p35 platinum due to the heatpipe "mess"... I hope there will be less cleareance problems with the p45 version.

 

While I appreciate the nostalgia, jumpers have had their place in time. Let them sleep quietly in the past.... such fun memories on my k6-2 motherboard. Although it is nice to see that they at least admit their BIOS is lacking against their competitors.

*I wish ASUS would put better descriptions on what their BIOS options do.....*

 

Heatpipes a-go-go! No wonder some motherboards are so dear, the amount of copper included on them these days.

 

Any mention of whether or not the 10GigE port was included on the ICH10R bridge? There's about 0.0001% chance that anyone will be able to use it right now, but it'd be the first example of an affordable 10GigE NIC if it's there! I've been looking into 10GigE/Infiniband hardware lately, so it's currently 'relevent to my interests'.

(I very much doubt it'll be able to provide [anything near] the full ~1.1GB/sec transfer rate but.. Be nice to see some benchmarks against the existing Gigabit-based ICH9.)

 

that chipset cooler is a thing of beauty although my opinions may change if it makes things evil to work on

 

Isnt that a bad thing, you want to dissipate less heat, correct?

 

They mean the chips produce less heat.

 

yes, sorry - bad choice of word. They produce less heat than traditional designs.

 

<- NOT an MSI fan but this: looks great.

(not sure how well it functions but I doubt I'll ever own one anyway so...)

 

i am pretty sure those heatpipes are just for show.

 

Maybe its just me, but on the K9A2, putting the pci-e 1x in the middle of the pci-e x16 seems like a bad idea. It would be nice if it had an extra pci-e 1x since they know what you will use that one for... Hopefully they make the SLI connector long enough to make it over their sound card.

 

The heatpipes look pretty good but they're too big

 

The way things seem to be going between nVidia and Intel – reminds me when Intel and AMD ‘loved’ each other.
Unfortunately Intel currently does not support nVidia’s SLI technology and to be honest, don’t see anything on the way.

 

Actually, i have found one! And its a winner

 

that's an nVidia chipset.

may be Intel wants AMD to be forced into graphics only, and at the same time squeeze nVidia out.

 

Might anyone know the specifics on the BIOS for this board? I'm wondering if the lack of features might be due to MSI focusing on something else, or maybe the BIOS is something different than their BIOS in the past and they don't have all the bells and whistles done yet.

Concerning those cryptic options, maybe someone should start a thread on them. They may have to deal with specific hardware functionality and the descriptions make sense, but only if you know the hardware.