[H]ard|OCP reviews MSI P6N-SLI Platinum nForce 650i based motherboard
MSI has been a major player in the motherboard market for several years now. Established in 1986 MSI has continued to grow and expand in the market and is now one of the top 3 motherboard manufacturers in the world today. Over the last few years they've diversified into other areas with great success. One of their most successful ventures is in the video card market, though I still typically think of MSI first for motherboards more than anything. The P6N-SLI Platinum is built around the 650i SLI chipset. The 650i SLI chipset is the entry level SLI compatible offering in NVIDIA's 600 series MCPs. Fortunately it offers most of the performance features of its more expensive siblings.
The MSI P6N-SLI Platinum supports the latest Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core / Core 2 Duo / Intel Pentium Extreme and Intel Pentium D processors. Following industry trends the P6N-SLI Platinum requires only a few components to create a working machine. The required components are: Socket LGA775 CPU, DDR 2 memory, power supply, drives and a video card. MSI integrated the following components into the 650i Ultra's design: 1 ATA-133 port; 1 floppy port; 8 USB ports; (4 on the backplane and 2 headers supporting 2 ports each.) ; 4 SATA 3G ports; 1 eSATA port; 2 IEEE1394 ports (1 on the backplane and 1 header supporting 1 port each.); 1 GigE Ethernet port; 6 mini-headphone jacks and of course standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports...
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