Overclocking
For our overclocking tests, we swapped our Core 2 Duo E6700 engineering sample for a retail E6300 we've had up to 3.3GHz without extra voltage or cooling. To get things started, we locked the memory bus at 800MHz and started turning the screws on the front-side bus. System stability was tested with Prime95 and the rthdribl HDR lighting demo.

The Fatal1ty tops out at 390MHz

With the Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI, we started to run into problems with front-side bus speeds above 370MHz. A north bridge voltage boost to 1.35V seemed to do the trick, and we pressed on to 390MHz without issue. However, the board refused to post with a 400MHz front-side bus speed, and no amount of additional voltage for the chipset or other components got us into Windows at that speed. We even tried lowering the CPU multiplier, to no avail.

MSI manages 400MHz

We observed similar behavior from the P6N SLI Platinum, which required a north bridge voltage boost to maintain stability at front-side bus speeds above 380MHz. In this case, 1.4V was needed, and that only took us up to 390MHz. We had to crank the north bridge voltage to 1.5V to get the board stable with a 400MHz front-side bus, and it would go no further, no matter what we tried.

So both boards overclocked to within 10MHz of each other, which isn't entirely surprising given that they use the same 650i chipset. 400MHz is respectable, too, but it's still well shy of the 470MHz we hit with Asus' 650i-based P5N-E SLI, though.