MSI to Launch P965 Crossfire Motherboards

MSI announced a Crossfire compatible P965 Motherboard. The new P965 Platinum is
based on Intel's P965 Broadwater chipset, which is designed to support ATI's Crossfire multi-GPU technology. Previous reports informed that P965 chipset would not support Crossfire compatibility. However, it seems that ATI reconsidered its strategies and allowed Crossfire compatibility with Intel's chipset, taking into consideration RD600 release problems.

But ATI thought of a drawback to hinder P965's design. While Intel's 975X chipset supports two PCI Express X16 slots with eight lanes routed to each slot upon insertion of two graphic cards, P965 is able to offer only one full speed PCI Express X16 slot interconnected with four lanes to one physical PCI Express X16 slot (16+4). MSI is the first motherboard manufacturer to present P965 support integrated with Crossfire technology, but there should be other companies offering this kind of solution without the annoying drawback.

The official specs include:

Supported CPUs: Intel LGA-775 Pentium 4 (3xx, 5xx, 6xx, 8xx, 9xx), Core 2 Duo and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
FSB: 1066/800/533 MHz
Chipset: Intel P965 with ICH8R southbridge
Memory: Dual-channel DDR2 533/667/800 (for up to 8GB)
RAID: 0, 1, 5, 10
SATA ports: 6 SATA ports with transfer rate up to 3Gb/s
PCIe slot: One PCIe x16, one PCIe x4, two PCIe x1 and two 32-bit master PCI bus
Audio: 8-channel audio codec Realtek 883
LAN: Realtek RTL8111B
IEEE1394: VIA 6308 chipset
Mounting: 9 mounting holes
Dimension: ATX form factor: 30.5x24.5cm