PCB Design and Functionality

MSI X48 Platinum mainboard looks very nice from the technical as well as aesthetical standpoints. As for the aesthetics, it deserves our best praises for very well-balanced, harmonious color scheme, sophisticatedly curved heatpipes… The only discord brought into this pretty picture is the too bright LEDs that are not that functional. However, you will only see them when the mainboard is powered up and they may annoy only those of you who have transparent panels or windows in their system case.

However, aesthetics and harmony are not the primary topics of our examination, so let’s move on to the technical side. MSI X48 Platinum has very good layout, close to classical, I would say. All components seem to be very conveniently located and do not stand out at first glance:

As usual, let’s get to the roots of things starting with the most noticeable component – fanless Circu-Pipe cooling system that has changed a lot since the first appearance on MSI platforms. We have already come across this cooling solution when we talked about MSI P35 Platinum Combo and MSI P35 Platinum mainboards, and in both those cases the Circu-Pipe cooling system used was exactly the same. This time, the first heatpipe originates not from the ICH9R South Bridge heatsink but from exact same heatsink marked as PCIe Expander. The heatsink tops IDT PES16T7 controller that manages the work of two additional PCI Express x16 slots.

Missing the first two smaller heatsinks, this heatpipe passes through the base of the large heatsink on the chipset North Bridge and loops into half a ring above it.

However, the second half a ring of the other heat-pipe is missing, now this heatpipe starts not above the heatsink, but at its base and then goes straight to the heatsink on MOSFET transistors together with the other two heatpipes.

The plate array on the remaining half a ring became larger to make up for the absence of the second half a ring, however the heatsinks on the chipset North Bridge and MOSFET transistors remained of the same size. They just started to look a little rougher because they no longer have rounded corners, but they remained of exact same size, even though the fourth heatsink - that used to be next to the memory slots on MSI P35 Platinum mainboard - has also disappeared. The absence of the fourth heatsink is definitely a good thing because it ensures much better mainboard compatibility with large processor coolers, however, it has a negative effect on the cooling efficiency. The platform now has an additional PCI Express controller, the chipset North Bridge heats up noticeably greater, but the heat dissipation area of the Circu-Pipe cooling system got smaller, which immediately showed in our tests.