MSI P55-GD80 LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

Included Software

Now that we have the motherboard unpacked and installed, it is time to take a look at some of the software utilities that MSI have included with the P55-GD80.


Here we have the familiar setup screens for the included software CD. It contains all the drivers and MSI-specific utilities that you will need to get your system up & running. However, we obviously recommend that you visit MSI's website to get the very latest drivers and software revisions, or...


...you can use Live Update 4, which will search for and download the latest BIOS, drivers, and utilities for you.


Control Center is MSI's main software utility and it contains system information, overclocking & tweaking settings, and energy-saving features. To be honest though, it's not all that brilliant. It doesn't recognize the highest Turbo Boost CPU multipliers, so when our i7-870 is using 24-25-26-27X multipliers it will only show 23X max. It also crashes...a lot. Every time we would adjust the vCore and then run LinX, Control Center would have a fatal error requiring it to close. Every time we clicked on the 'Max Power Saving' setting the system would just shut down, as if someone pulled the power cord. Thankfully, the voltage and temperature monitoring section does have accurate real-time readouts. There are also a few neat gimmicks like the ability to enable/disable the motherboard LEDs from within Windows and the ability to view individual MOSFET temperatures. Overall though, this is one utility that needs some serious work. We were using build version 1.0.128, just for reference sake. (- Oct. 21 '09: This issue has been resolved, see update in the conclusion.)


The Drive Booster Manager is a simple utility that works in coordination with the onboard JMicron 322 SATA RAID controller to help view hard drive information, create RAID arrays (0/1/JBOD), and delete RAID arrays.