MSI P45 Platinum Review

A song from the group Disturbed comes to mind here, "Down with the Sickness." The P45 Platinum is the first and only motherboard I have been able to get a Quad core processor over 500MHz. In fact, 515MHz was achieved and was stable enough to run some of our benchmark suite. 515MHz is a great validation screen shot but I wanted to find out where I could gain a measure of stability without having to cook my little piece of silicon. This I found at 491MHz with 1.424 volts and running the memory at a 1:1 ratio. Auto settings were good for the voltages up until 470MHz. The exception being the Vcore and Vdimm voltages. These were manually set from the start of the testing. After this point the GTL reference voltages played a large role in increasing the stability of the overclock. The GTL reference voltage settings needed for stability will vary from CPU to CPU. Much the same way no two CPUs will be identical in the voltages needed to reach a set clock speed. The MSI P45 has got some serious overclocking cajones! Just keep in mind this is air cooled through and through!