MSI P55-GD80 LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

Hardware Installation

In the Hardware Installation section we examine how major components fit on the motherboard, and whether there are any serious issues that may affect installation and general functionality. Specifically, we are interested in determining whether there is adequate clearance in all critical areas.


When installed in the traditional North-South orientation, our Thermalright MUX-120 (ie: updated Ultra-120) cooler had no clearance issues on this motherboard, easily clearing the MOSFET heatsinks and with a fair bit of room between the 120MM fan and the first DIMM slot.


However, when we rotated the cooler to the East-West orientation things got a little more tricky. As you can see, in this orientation the MUX-120 slightly overhangs the first DIMM slot, which means that you can't use memory modules with tall heatspreaders. Thankfully, the second DIMM slot was fully accessible, although with very tall heatspreaders you may have to install the fan clip after installing the memory modules. On the other hand, if you have low-profile memory modules, then there are no clearance problems whatsoever.


The 8-pin CPU power connector and the 24-pin ATX power connector are both placed in very good locations, there are no installation issues to report.


Thanks to the expansion slot layout, there is a nice gap between the memory clips and the back of the graphics card.


No matter what orientation the CPU cooler is installed in, there is plenty of clearance between it and the back of the graphics card, which means easy access to the PCI-E x16 slot clip.


Thanks to a well thoughtout expansion slot layout, when you install two dual-slot graphics cards on this motherboard you will not lose access to the precious PCI slot. However, you do lose access to the two upward facing blue SATA ports and the Direct OC buttons.


What if you're a Folder and you want to make use of the third PCI-E x16 slot? Well you definitely can, but you will lose acess to the Direct OC and Genie OC buttons, as well as the LED display, not to mention the touch sensitive easy buttons. You will also lose access to the all the USB and FireWire headers at the bottom of the motherboard. More importantly though, if you install a dual-slot graphics card in the third PCI-E x16 slot, it will overhang the motherboard, so keep that in mind if you have a shorter case.



The six 90-degree SATA ports are obviously accessible no matter how many graphics cards are installed, as is the IDE port.


Since Thermalright has not yet released their LGA1156 bracket, we cannot properly test to see if there are any clearance issues, however there is nothing on the back of the P55-GD80 that gives us cause for concern.