Having used a variety of motherboards with NVIDIA's 650i chipset during the past 18 months, I wasn't sure about the 750i's benefit over the former, although it seems to be a refresh with some nice tweaks.
The 650i-based motherboards, which include MSI's P6N SLI Platinum, have been trouble-free with performance comparable to more expensive motherboards. As I look at MSI's new offering, the P7N SLI Platinum, I wonder how much improvement over the former there is. That will be the main question to answer for this review.
MSI P7N SLI Platinum 750i Motherboard
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
As with the P6N motherboard, the P7N Platinum features an elaborate copper heatsink/heatpipe chipset cooling solution on a jet-black circuit board. The heatpipe arrangement runs from the MOSFET's to the System Platform Processor (C55 SPP), the nForce 430i Media and Communications Processor (C51 MCP) and the nForce 200.
MSI P7N SLI Platinum 750i Motherboard
The P7N SLI Platinum is uncluttered and has plenty of space. The use of the 430i MCP limits the motherboard to a single LAN port and a maximum of four SATA ports. This isn't a big deal for me personally and you do get the use of two IDE ports and a floppy drive port, which are located at the bottom of the motherboard. Connecting to the IDE and floppy ports can be a hassle as a long cable is needed in most setups to reach the intended device, which are mounted higher up in an ATX tower case.
One final observation is that the P7N Platinum offers three x16 PCI-Express slots that are PCIe 2.0 compatible. This is a little confusing as the nForce 430 MCP offers no PCIe lanes so apparently MSI has enabled the available 8 lanes on the nForce 200. Note that this motherboard does not support 3-way SLI.
SPECIFICATIONS
First up is a connectivity block diagram. The nForce 750i SLI appears to be a refresh of the nForce 650i SLI chipset. However, the nForce 200 chip does provide PCI Express 2.0 features, although the lanes are cut from 32-lane capability, as found on the nForce 780i, to 24 lanes and NVIDIA's Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA) is not featured on this chipset. Nothing much else appears to be changed, even the nForce 430 MCP has been retained.
Connectivety Block Diagram
Detailed specifications for this motherboard can be viewed using the following scrollable applet.
