MSI P55-GD80 LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

Voltage Regulation / Power Consumption

Our voltage regulation testing will focus on the various voltages and the differences encountered between what is selected in the BIOS and what is measured by a digital multi-meter (DMM). Thanks to the V-Check Points, we didn't have to go poking & prodding everywhere, since all the voltage read points are located in one convenient spot. The concept is pretty simple, simply plug your DMM leads into the V-Check cables, and plug one cable into the desired voltage point and the other into a ground point.

Voltage Regulation

These measurements were taken at stock system speeds and with C1E, SpeedStep, Turbo Boost, and Thermal Monitor disabled in the BIOS. Just to clarify, the vCore (LLC) section is the vCore results with Load-Line Calibration enabled. Here are our findings:


As you can see, Load-Line Calibration is broken on this motherboard...or they simply mixed up enable/disable in the BIOS. We tried the three latest BIOS versions (1.2/1.3/1.4), and all three exhibited the exact same issue. This is both bad quality assurance on MSI's behalf and downright embarassing for every other site that reviewed this motherboard and never noticed the problem. If LLC is not actually broken, and they simply inversed enable/disable, then we aren't satisfied with this motherboard's 'default' vCore output, since an up to 0.08V droop between what is selected in the BIOS and what the P55-GD80 outputs under load is simply too large a difference. (- Oct. 21 '09: This issue has been resolved, see update in the conclusion.)

Aside from this hiccup, the other voltages are really quite good.


Now usually we would run a one-hour OCCT stress to take a closer look at the vCore's characteristics while under heavy load, but...


...as you can see, OCCT 3.1.0 doesn't recognize this motherboard vCore line, so there's not much we can do.

Power Consumption

All motherboard manufacturers boast that their products have the lowest power consumption and feature the latest new development in energy efficiency. Well that is what we are here to find out.

For this test, every BIOS option was reset to its default setting and the Windows Vista power plan was changed from High Performance to Balanced. Lastly, we set the ASUS EPU-6 Engine to AUTO mode to allow it to fully manage system power consumption. We also tan this test without EPU being installed on the system, to see what the difference would be.

For our idle test, we let the system idle for 15 minutes and measured the peak wattage through our UPM EM100 power meter.

For our CPU load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads for 15 minutes, measuring the peak wattage via the UPM EM100 power meter.

For our overall system load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads for 15 minutes, while simultaneously loading the GPU with OCCT v3.1.0 GPU:OCCT stress test at 1680x1050@60Hz in fullscreen mode.


As you can see, the MSI P55-GD80 proved to be the most power efficient P55 motherboard that we have come across, by far! The Green Power feature is enabled by default, and it is clearly interacting with the DrMOS PWM to produce some impressively low power consumption numbers. Not only do the DrMOS 3-in-1 MOSFETs feature higher efficiency than traditional MOSFETs, up to 96% as per MSI, but they have much lower power loss as well. The results speak for themselves.