MSI P55-GD80 LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

Conclusion

First, let's start with the physical aspects of the board. The overall layout is quite good considering how many additional features MSI have built onto the P55-GD80. The majority of the connectors and ports are on the edge of the motherboard, or as close as can be. There is a good variety of expansion slots and their layout is decent, although those planning to install a third dual-slot graphics card in the bottommost PCI-E x16 have to consider the overhang issue. The passive, low profile cooling system is tasteful and does its job very well. The V-Check points and the V-Switch are readily accessible, although obviously those using a test bench will have the easiest time using them. The touch-sensitive Easy Button 2 panel works surprisingly well, and it's one of the better novelty features that we have seen as of late.

From an overclocking point-of-view, the P55-GD80 couldn't quite match the impressive ASUS P7P55D Deluxe in outright core clock, but it did manage to squeeze a little extra BCLK out of our Core i5-750. On the memory front, the MSI once again fell behind the P7P55D's overclocking capabilities, but did a achieve solid DDR3-2167 9-9-9. A BIOS update could feasibly close this very minor gap.

While overclocking, the Direct OC buttons really came in handy when balancing right on the edge of stability. It was an infinitely better solution than using the problem-prone Control Center software. Likewise, the V-Check points proved indispensable, since they allowed us to easily confirm our suspicions that Load-Line Calibration (LLC) was not working properly. Whether it is truly broken or they simply mixed up with the enabled/disabled settings, we don't know but it doesn't exactly help our opinion of the P55-GD80. Thankfully, this is a problem that could instantly be fixed with a update BIOS.

The OC Genie feature was foolproof and pretty much as quick as promised (1-2 second OC). While it did automatically overclock our i5-750 to 3.34Ghz and our i7-870 to 3.73Ghz, these results are not quite as good as what we achieved with the P7P55D's auto-overclocking solution. Furthermore, the voltages that OC Genie used to achieve these overclocks were needlessly high in our opinion, and potentially even a little dangerous in the long-term.

To conclude, when we first got this motherboard for preview, we were excited to try it out since it appeared that MSI had a product that could easily go toe-to-toe against the other high-end P55 motherboards that had been unveiled. Now that we have spent a considerable amount of time with the P55-GD80 we are still convinced of this, but it needs to be polished a little bit more. The hardware is sound and that's 90% of the battle, but the BIOS (ie: LLC) and the software still need some work.

Keep an eye on this space, as we will surely have an update shortly.


Update (Oct. 21 2009):

We just had the opportunity to try out a BETA bios (V1.6B5), and it renames 'Load Line Calibration' to 'VDroop Control'. The options for this setting are likewise relabeled from 'Enabled/Disabled' to 'Low VDroop/High VDroop'. This resolves our criticism of the LLC implementation. In effect, 'Enabled' becomes 'High VDroop', which supports our findings.

The day after we posted this review, MSI also released a new version of Control Center on their website (1.0.130). This new version appears to have fixed the errors and stability issues that we had encountered with the 1.0.128 build of this application.

Given these developments, once an updated BIOS is officially released on MSI's website, the P55-GD80 will be worthy of our Dam Good Award.

Update (Oct. 30 2009):

The proper final version 1.6 BIOS has now been posted on MSI's website and it seems great to us, so without further ado here is the well deserved award:



Pros

- Solid performance.
- Surprisingly low power consumption.
- Attractive theme & heatsink designs.
- User-friendly layout.
- 2-Way CrossFireX & 2-Way SLI capability.
- Good SATA II & USB 2.0 connectivity.
- Powered eSATA port.
- Very impressive accessories bundle.
- Very good BLCK & CPU overclocking capabilities.
- Handy onboard V-Check read points.
- Direct OC Base Clock buttons work very well.
- The ability to monitor the temperatures of the individual MOSFETs is pretty neat.
- Official Xeon X3450 support.
- OC Genie auto-overclocking solution produces good results and quickly, but...


Cons

- ...the voltages it sets are too high for our liking.
- Load-Line Calibration (LLC) is broken. (- Oct. 21 '09: No longer applicable, see update above.)
- Software suite is buggy. (- Oct. 21 '09: No longer applicable, see update above.)
- A dual-slot graphics card in the 3rd PCI-E x16 slot will overhang the motherboard.
- Memory overclocking could be a little bit better.

Our thanks to MSI for making this review possible!