MSI P55-GD80 LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

Synthetic Benchmarks

Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to pick up most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms on your desktop. We selected two of Everest's seven CPU benchmarks: CPU Queen and FPU Mandel. According to Lavalys, CPU Queen simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. The FPU Mandel benchmark measures the double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. Both tests consume less than 1 MB system memory, and are HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.


In stock form, all three motherboards are roughly equivalent in the CPU Queen benchmark, with a slight edge going towards the ASUS. But the situation is a fair bit different in FPU Mandel. Why? The reason is simple, both the ASUS and MSI utilized a 1X higher multiplier throughout the test than the Intel board did.


Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

As part of its enthusiast favourite Cache & Memory Benchmark, Everest provides very useful and in-depth cache performance figures. For this chart, we have combined the read, write, and copy bandwidth figures to achieve an aggregate bandwidth figure for each cache stage.


With their most recent BIOS versions, all three motherboards are effectively even across all three processor cache levels.


Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to pick up most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking utility provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system.


Once again, all three motherboards are even when it comes memory bandwidth, and any differences can be attributed to this benchmark's wide results variance.


Although the P55-GD80 consistently had the highest memory latency, the difference between it and the ASUS model was a mere 1%. On the other hand, the DP55KG keeps its crown as latency champion at the moment, largely due to its more aggressive default secondary memory timings.


Now let's see if ScienceMark echoes these results.

ScienceMark v2.0

Although last updated almost 3 years ago, and despite its rudimentary interface, ScienceMark v2.0 remains a favorite for accurately calculating bandwidth on even the newest chipsets.


ScienceMark reveals the MSI to have the lowest memory bandwidth of all three motherboards, but the difference between the models is a mere 1.5%.


ScienceMark does support Everest's memory latency results, with the MSI once again exhibiting higher latency than both the ASUS and Intel models.

There's really not much to report here as all three motherboards are performing within less than 1-2% of each other in these popular synthetic benchmarks. Will the results be any different in real-life applications? Let's find out.