The second round of our releases of the new P55 chipset is form the MSI, their new high-end premium of the P55 series adding some of the over-clocking potential of the new corei5 and the LGA1156 corei7 processors. Well the high end GD65 is not considered the enthusiast type of motherboard than its bigger brother GD90 motherboard, well it still retains its cool looks and in the publicity of the motherboard is steaks in the performance business and also the price point of mid-range users who are willing to upgrade their existing system.
The MSI P55GD65 is a This blue plastic rectangle with six square holes houses pins that offer voltage check points, so you can take a multimeter to them and get a real-time readout, without having to rely on often inaccurate software or BIOS readings. In actual fact, we found the reading to be within 0.04V of what CPU-Z stated, although a multimeter would offer a much faster and more accurate vDroop when the CPU and memory loaded. The pins offer all the important readouts: VTT, DDR, CPU and PCH voltage.
On the 2009 end of things, MSI’s latest “OC Genie” is, in many ways, equivalent to Asus’ RoG chips that aid overclocking. MSI told us its job is a hardware solution to help with normal overclocking, but mostly it’s to do with the OC Genie button at the bottom of the board. With a single press, it automatically runs the system through a series of tests to overvolt and overclock the CPU and memory. Both x16 PCI-Express 2.0 slots for graphics are obviously marked in blue, and match the usual single x16 or dual x8s other boards feature. The three spaces between them offers plenty of breathing room for hot cards, or super sized coolers, and the two PCI, two x1 PCI-Exress and single, open ended x4 slot allow for plenty of upgrade potential too.
Each DrMOS contains up and down MOSFETs and driver IC in a single package - each can typically handle the power requirements as well as any 12 to 16-phase design from Asus or Gigabyte. Only EVGA uses the same as MSI (although do not brand it DrMOS) and typically uses more because of the greater lean towards the extreme overclocking end of the market. The OC Genie is very easy to use, works exactly as advertised, and generates quite a good result for us, although it could use some more aggressive settings perhaps because it’s still several hundred MHz short of what we know the board and CPU can do. We realise MSI is most likely playing it safe and the people that are likely to use this simple option will no doubt be chuffed at the free performance gain for all the effort of straightening an index finger and extending an arm.
Up to this point, evertthing is hunky dory, but what MSI is absolutely missing is some form of BIOS backup and redundency. For a board in 2009 of this cost not to have an efficient BIOS recovery mechanism is sacrilegious. We unluckily bricked one board of the two boards we got (hey, it happens - we get every manufacturer failing at one point or other) using the inbuilt M-Flash program and found the supposed recovery technique was as effective as a chocolate teapot, and didn’t even taste half as good. What have we got left? Sending it back to MSI, and if we weren’t lucky enough to have them on our speed dial, we’d be thoroughly miffed.