MSI P67A-GD55 – Features

MSI has also jumped on the LGA1155 bandwagon, offering a dozen P67 boards alone. The Large Bang-Marshal or the P67A-GD80 are the most desirable, existence very high-end motherboards. The P67A-GD65 is also a great choice if y'all desire something more affordable that has a high-cease vibe to it.

Sadly, MSI is tight on samples and we couldn't become our easily on the P67A-GD80. The P67A-GD65 probably made the most sense for this article given the competition, but that too is unavailable. Nosotros didn't think MSI would exist in the roundup, merely at the last minute they coughed upwards the P67A-GD55. It'southward absolutely not the competition for the Asrock P67 Extreme6, Asus P8P67 Palatial and Gigabyte P67A-UD7, but it'south all MSI could provide.

Nonetheless, given the P67A-GD55's ~$170 cost tag, it's fairly well equipped. MSI has added USB three.0, FireWire as well as Gigabit LAN and the company has recently been pushing their "Military Class II" design, which is an answer to Gigabyte'south Ultra Durable three. Any MSI motherboard branded with the Armed services Class Two label feature How-do-you-do-c Capacitors, Super Ferrite Chokes and Solid Capacitors.

MSI utilizes Howdy-c CAPs made of the rare element Tantalum, which sustains very high temperatures and shows an amazingly high conductivity. The SFC (Super Ferrite Choke) uses a Ferrite core that is Super-Permeable and runs 35 degrees Celsius cooler than the traditional choke. Solid Capacitors make bursting caps a not-issue along with ensuring a longer lifetime and ultra-depression ESR.

You'll get this aforementioned marketing mumbo jumbo from board makers such equally Asus and Gigabyte. While we are confident that these are ameliorate quality components, how much divergence they actually make is largely unknown to us.

Moving on to stuff that we know volition brand a difference, the P67A-GD55 carries a pair of NEC D720200F1 controllers which provide two USB 3.0 ports on the I/O panel and another two via onboard headers.

Unfortunately, while all other motherboards featured in our roundup include a 3.5" front end mounting module for the additional USB 3.0 ports, the P67A-GD55 does not. This means that out of the box, these ports are useless unless you buy the optional subclass.

Although we couldn't find an OEM version of this role online, Silverstone sells 1 for $24. If you really want this office, you're best off upgrading to the P67A-GD65 which includes the bracket for roughly the price of purchasing it separately with the P67A-GD55.

Every bit was the case with Asrock's board the 8-channel audio is delivered by the Realtek ALC892 codec which supports THX TruStudio Pro. Again, despite of having seen this chipset on numerous motherboards before, nosotros can't detect any real info on information technology. Realtek's site only lists viii-channel codecs from the ALC861 to the ALC889.

Whereas all the motherboards featured in the roundup so far have offered dual Gigabit LAN controllers, the P67A-GD55 features only a single Realtek RTL8111E controller. It utilizes a PCI Express one.i x1 (2.0Gb/s) lane and supports a broad range of features such every bit Wake-On-LAN, LAN Cablevision Detection and Free energy Efficient Ethernet 802.3az.

The FireWire support is provided by an old VIA VT6308P controller which is limited to the PCI bus supporting a pair of IEEE1394 ports. Overall, the MSI P67A-GD55 seems quite underwhelming when compared to the competition and it'll be interesting to see how it stacks upwardly.