Chipset:

The successor of the P965 seems a little bit faster compared to its older brother, conclusive results will be posted when we get our hands on some high-end motherboards and put them through our lab. The only new feature here is support for DDR3 memory, which is insanely expensive right now and will not result in faster operation due the added latency penalty. Some of the iCH9 derivates will have a hardware firewall feature, well known from Nvidia.

BIOS:

MSI has once again choosen an AMI BIOS, which is still in Beta. The recognition of SPD has some faults, the CPU-fan can't slow down when using 3-pin CPU-fans. There is also no setting for the command rate. To let anyone set the CPU-VCore at +0.7875V is quite insane and of course useless. MSI has a lot work ahead, we will keep you updated when a final BIOS arrives.