Introduction:

The P35 chipset has been around for quite a while and definitely gives an extra boost to your Intel CPU. A high front side bus combined with very decent memory tweaking pushes your system to the edge. Today, we have a look at the MSI Platinum Combo, the DFI P35 Lanparty, Foxconn's P35AP-S and the Asus P5K Vanilla.

MSI has always delivered decent motherboards for both AMD and Intel, whereas DFI, known for its fabulous S939 boards, has had some problems with the production of motherboards with an Intel chipset in the past. However, it seems that Oskar Wu has done some magic.

Oskar, known for his incredible work on Abit’s NF7-S and DFI’s NF4 series, was able to push the FSB of this motherboard beyond imagination, creating a big hype on the XtremeSystems forums. Click for the XtremeSystems forum thread. Foxconn is a relative newcomer to the end-user motherboard market, but has proven that it's capable of producing well-build boards with the Foxconn Mars series. Recently, they have enlisted Peter Tan, better known as Shamino, in order to get the most out of every board. Finally, Asus has already proven to be able to produce very big performers, especially Intel chipset based motherboards.


Insane FSB by Oscar Wu (click for verification link)


Note that both the CPU and motherboard are handpicked and the system was cooled by a cascade cooling system. This is not representable, not every system will be able to work at 600+ MHz FSB!

The DFI is built for the enthusiasts, whereas MSI is not very popular amongst the enthusiast’s community, though most boards are built up very decently, remember the Neo2 ? Both MSI and Foxconn sent us a board compatible with both DDR2 and DDR3. The Asus P5K has been around since the release of the P35 chipset.

Price/performance is important, so let’s find out if the less expensive motherboards can keep up with the high-end.

Enough speculation, time for pictures !