Y
ou can change CPU sockets, dump
PCI, and jettison legacy ports all day
long, but nothing, absolutely nothing,
pisses people off like moving to a new type
of RAM. Luckily, there’s a fallback: dual-
format RAM motherboards such as MSI’s
P35 Combo Platinum board.
Based on Intel’s P35 chipset, the Combo
Platinum will take up to four DDR2 modules
or two DDR3 modules. But don’t think about
running them simultaneously—it’s impossible.
You’ll also have to run a pair of funky blank
adapters to get the board running.
The Combo Platinum performed quite well(unlike most combo boards we’ve tested), with
scores on par with or slightly better than those
of the Intel and Gigabyte X48 DDR3 boards
we reviewed in the July issue. Why? We run
our DDR3 board tests with fairly relaxed RAM
timings to eliminate stability issues. We’re
certain that the X48 boards would be faster if
we pushed the RAM timings a bit.
Now for the big question: How do the
DDR2 and DDR3 modes compare? We tested
the board at DDR2/800 and DDR3/1333 and
saw DDR3 outperform DDR2 by about 4
percent in most benchmarks. That’s not bad.
Overclocking, however, was only fair. We
pushed our Core 2 Quad Q9300 from
its stock 333MHz front-side bus to
about 450MHz but couldn’t break the
500MHz mark, which we did easily
with the Asus Striker Extreme II board
(July 2008). That board, however, costs
more than $300.
The Combo Platinum’s biggest
downside is SATA placement. A large
GPU, such as a GeForce 9800 GTX,
will block two of the fi ve ports. Themobo was also fi nicky with our DDR2 mod-
ules and would not hit DDR2/1066 speeds.
The real question you should ask
yourself is if purchasing this board makes
any sense. If you have a boatload of DDR2,
you’re better off buying a DDR2-only P35
board. Are you really going to throw away
your existing DDR2 RAM and buy DDR3 in
12 months? Probably not.
Still, we understand the appeal of the
upgrade path, and warts aside, the board’s
performance is certainly respectable.- G O R D O N M A H U N G
MSI P35 Combo Platinum
DDR2 or DDR3—it’s your choice!
The P35 Combo
Platinum uses RAM
cards to let it run
either DDR2 or DDR3.72 | MAXIMUMPC | AUG 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
VERDICT$160, http://www.msicomputer.com8
Good performance
for a pretty resonable
price.You can run DDR2
or DDR3, but is that
really a big deal?XB-70MSI P35 COMBO PLATINUMB-58IN THE LAB^
REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWAREBest scores are bolded. Our test bed consists of a Core 2 Quad Q9300, a GeForce 8800 GTX, a Western Digital Raptor 150, Windows XP Pro, and Corsair Dominator DDR2 and
DDR3 RAM.BENCHMARKS
MSI P35 Combo MSI P35 Combo Intel (DDR3 mode) (DDR2 mode) DX48BT2
PCMark 2005 8!729 8,826 8!432
3DMark06 Overall 12,756 12!732 12!268
ScienceMark 2.0 Mem 6!291 6!110 6!550
Valve Particle test (fps) 97 93 91
UT3 (fps) 117 110 104
FEAR (fps) 261 250 247
Quake 4 (fps) 177 172 174