During my recent trip to China and Taiwan, I not only spent time with Intel's executives at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, but also visited several manufacturers in Taiwan on the second leg of my trip.

We've already had brief looks at what Cooler Master, Lian Li and Gigabyte have in the pipeline. Today it's time to look at two soon-to-be-released motherboards from MSI, the P45 Platinum and the K9A2 Diamond.

It will come as no surprise that the former is based on Intel's up and coming P45 chipset, while the latter is based on Nvidia's nForce 780a SLI chipset, whose release is imminent. Before we get onto that board though, let's have a look at the P45 Platinum.