MSI has quietly been building solid enthusiast-oriented motherboards for years now, and the P6N Platinum is the company's latest mid-range offering. Like most MSI boards, the P6N is largely reserved and restrained, content to let others duke it out for the title of World's Flashiest Motherboard. That makes this board just about the polar opposite of the Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Already, we know that the P6N platinum packs more peripherals than the Abit board, but then it costs more as well. Street prices start at $154—nearly $30 more than the Fatal1ty. So what does the extra scratch get you?

Not much in the way of visual flair or improved power connector placement. Like Abit, MSI puts the board's auxiliary 12V power connector south of the socket, all but ensuring that cabling will interfere with airflow between the CPU socket and rear chassis exhaust.

Fortunately, there's still room around the CPU socket for larger coolers. MSI does employ extensive heatpipe cooling for the board's north bridge and power circuitry, but the heatsinks are far enough away from the socket to avoid clearance issues.

Like the Abit board, the P6N relies on passive heatsinks to keep its chipset components and VRMs cool. However, MSI also includes an optional chipset fan that screws onto the top of the north bridge cooler. This whiney little cooler isn't necessary for normal operation, but it's recommended for systems with limited internal airflow. The fan is also rather loud, so you'll want to avoid using it if possible.

MSI puts Serial ATA and IDE ports a little higher on the P6N than we saw with the Abit board, but they still don't interfere with longer double-wide graphics cards. The nForce 430i south bridge only has four SATA ports, so it doesn't have many to lose.

Note that the 430i also gets in on the board's heatpipe cooling, although I'm not entirely sure why. All the nForce 430 implementations we've seen have been perfectly happy with simple, low-profile coolers, so the P6N's south bridge heatpipe may not be necessary.

The P6N SLI's slot stack favors PCI over PCI Express x1, opting to provide three of the former and only one of the latter. That makes sense given the persistent dearth of PCIe peripherals, and it allows you to run two PCI cards alongside a double-wide SLI setup.

Like the Abit board, you also have to flip an SLI paddle to switch between single- and multi-GPU modes. This is probably something you're only going to do once or twice in the life of the motherboard, so the few seconds of effort are hardly a hassle.

There's quite a bit going on in the P6N SLI's port cluster, including nods to the old-school crowd with a parallel port and a shout out to the new generation of eSATA connectivity. You also get a Firewire port and both coaxial and TOS-Link flavors of S/PDIF audio output. I'd happily trade one of those S/PDIF output options for a digital input, though.