So the back panel houses all of those connections and ports we would come to expect with a modern motherboard. On the board itself, there are a few more plugs and pins to ponder over.

And all the appropriate Pin Headers for the Power Button, Reset Switch, Hard Drive Activity LEDs, and the sort.

A wholly typical implementation of the ATX motherboard form factor design. Some of the things I like about this board, and a few that I don't. And here's a big one right of the bat.

Why are DIMMS 1 and 3 green and DIMMS 2 and 4 orange? Pretty much every motherboard manufacturer out there will color code their DIMM slots to indicate Dual Channel versus Single Channel mode, just like Asus did with their CrossHair motherboard (above right). What's up MSI?

Here we have two PCI-e slots for graphics, a mini PCI-e 1x slot for added expansion, and three old school PCI slots. Note that a double wide PCI-e graphics card in the second PCI-E slot will block one of the PCI slots. I do like the retention tabs for the cards (see above right picture) which hug the card, rather than hold it in place. 

This small hunk of PCB helps to facilitate shifting between running a single PCI-e at 16x card or two PCI-e cards at 8x speeds. Typically, a motherboard should be able to auto-detect when a user has inserted two graphics cards and divide the PCI-e bus lanes between them accordingly. But in the case of our P6N SLI Platinum, MSI elected to use this little circuit pathway junction to help shift gears. This means you would have to remove this little trace card, flip it over, and re-insert it to swap between modes.  That's a lot of work, and removing this little card is a pain in the you know what!



I found the above to be a little awkward. The 8 pin Aux CPU power connector sits just southwest of the processor socket directly beneath the copper tubing for the heat pipe cooling system.

It's nice to see that our MSI P6N SLI Platinum uses, almost exclusively, solid state capacitors - though there is a small cluster of electrolytic capacitors that surround the on-board Realtek ALC888 audio chip. I have heard some reports of NVIDIA 600 series chipset based board owners complaining about popping and hissing sounds coming from the Realtek audio and how DTS apparently helps.



Heat pipes are here to stay, and what MSI has built is nice. This particular heat pipe design cools our VCM (Voltage Controller Module), the North Bridge, and South Bridge chips. There's even an included fan to attach to the NB heat sink, and we'll get to that when I drift over the included hardware.



Despite their copperish appearance, the heat sinks and fins are made from aluminum annodized to look like copper. I've worked enough with metals that I can also tell its not even good quality aluminum.  There's another thermal gripe right below, the use of thermal gum instead of quality paste:

In the case of our MSI P6N SLI Platinum motherboard, I was able to Arctic Silver the North Bridge chipset and the VCM (Voltage Controller Module) chips quite easily, especially since the rectangular pink and square white thermal gum pads peeled of without any trouble what so ever. I also managed to get the South Bridge cleaned up also with much more effort.

And now for one of the biggest, most horrendous, near unforgivable flaws I have ever come to see with a modern motherboard. Just look at this.

What you see before you is a small surface mounted capacitor, used to help clean up current running through the board. This particular capacitor just happens live one the backside of the board, right under under one corner of the CPU socket. Normally, nothing to be concerned about if running a stock Intel LGA775 cooler, but when I had tried to install one of our Noctua NH-U12 CPU coolers, the back mounting plate was rocking around a whole lot. Turns out it was rubbing against this capacitor. I seem to recall saying to myself, "Crap, this is bad, real bad."

What was I going to do? I certainly didn't want to test and overclock this board with stock cooling, the Gods of OC would never forgive me. A quick rummage through our parts bin had found me some brass motherboard stand-offs, an old anti-static bag. Here's what I came up with, or to use an old term, something I MacGyvered together (see old television show called MacGyver).

This hacked mounting back plate allowed me to safely mount one of our Noctua coolers without running the risk of shorting, crushing, or snapping off that capacitor. The piece of anti-static bag is simply wrapped around a few hunks of soft black foam, with the purpose of picking up any pressure exerted upon the board by our Noctua cooler. A hack and slash solution, and one I shouldn't have had to improvise.

Well, that about does it for my basic impressions of the MSI P6N SLI Platinum motherboard.  Let's look at the bundled hardware next.