MSI P43-C51 Intel P43 Motherboard

MSI products have gotten some flack as of lately—probably undue, though. With products such as the P43 ATX, MSI won’t receive high-accolades from hardcore gamers with incredibly deep pockets. It will, however, receive a lot of praise here and among other serious gamers who don’t necessarily have 200 bucks to shell-out on a shiny new Rampage board.
First, it’s a great thing to see support for up to the Quad and Core 2 Extreme chipsets—as well as PCI Express modules (16x). Also, the 3 gig/s SATA 6 ports make up for just about any “lacking” in the connectivity department, at least from my prospect. It’s been overclocked at 3.6 gigahertz stable and has a very solid overall infrastructure. Here’re a couple more facts about the MSI P43-C51 (a mouthful, yes!)

• Bus speed knocks out 400 megahertz
• RAM is an awesome 800 megahertz (for this segment)
• Stability is above-average when it’s pressed to its limits
• 16 Gigs of memory supportable
• 8 Channel audio
• Some hardcore game junkies would like RAIDsupport, but they pay a pretty penny for it often times
• It needs a dedicated firewire port
• Needs a processor heatpipe

It’s a mid-range motherboard and it’s going to, accordingly, have mid-range features, accessories and performance specs. That said, it’s fairly comparable to earlier model Intel or AMD-based Rampage models—which is saying a lot. And I might receive a seething scolding from Rampage fans, but that’s about what it boils down to.

That really sums it up. It’s worth repeating that it won’t satisfy hardcore gamers, but it’s a serious contender for the 80-100 dollar market range of motherboards. Some of the additional benefits that give it a little boost are: it’s easy to install, has a simple layout (for even the beginner gamer), and supports speeds that are very acceptable in this range.

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