MSI X58 Platinum review

The X58 Platinum comes in at around the same price as the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5, and in many areas it matches our recommended board, feature for feature.

That means plenty of connections, with eight USB ports, plus FireWire, eSATA and dual Gigabit Ethernet. Inside, you'll find eight SATA channels and support for up to 24GB of RAM in six slots, plus surface-mounted power, reset and CMOS buttons.

Overclocking is a breeze too, thanks to an onboard switch that boosts the base clock by 25% or 50%. For more control, the BIOS gives you plenty of scope to tweak, although the voltage controls aren't particularly fine.

As with the Biostar, however, once you start to look closely you'll spot a few compromises. The X58 Platinum has only two PCI Express x16 slots, and multi-GPU gaming works with ATI cards only - although SLI can reportedly be added with an unsupported BIOS hack.

Storage options are more limited too, with RAID5 notably missing from the mix, and no floppy controller - small omissions, but a big deal to those who need them.

As a final disappointment, the MSI lacks an onboard numeric display (there's a header, but nothing to attach to it), and the board's numerous coloured LEDs mostly show power mode information - less useful than the Gigabyte's speed and voltage indicators.

Although the X58 Platinum suffers slightly next to the GA-EX58-UD5, it's still a high-quality board, and its idle power consumption of 109W is low for a Core i7 system. But with the Gigabyte coming in at the same price, the MSI is pushed into second place.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith