Also, it's good to see that the entire motherboard will be cooled passively. MSI applies their SuperPipe cooling that we know from the GD65, but this time it has a larger heatsink that has to cover the 8+2-phase VRM. MSI uses a really thick 8mm heatpipe for the best cooling efficiency. Also do you spot the lower passive (wide) heatsink ? Stuffed under there is the P55 chipset.
Check it out, two x1 PCIe slots, three x16 PCIe graphics slots (rev 2.0), however only 16 PCie lanes are available. To top it off, two PCI slots. This GD80 is SLI (2-way / 3-way) compatible just like X58. Crossfire obviously will work with three cards as well, no questions asked there.
Look a bit closer, just above the analog audio headers and just above the white fan header you'll spot another diagnostic LED. That actually is an APS (Active Phase Switching) display. It shows the number of power phases that are activated.
And should you be worried about SLI/Crossfire bridges ... don't, it's all included.
Okay you guys and girls, that's it for this little preview of a P55 motherboard. This really as as much info as we are allowed to share. The P55 chipset itself falls under NDA, and of course Lynnfield processors (Core i5) are still pending a release and as such fall under embargo as well. Once that embargo will be lifted later this year, rest assured that we'll do our best to bring you fascinating coverage of this new technology, including a lot of tests and benchmarks.
We expect the pricing of this motherboard to hover at roughly 250USD. We certainly hope you enjoyed this little sneak preview. The MSI P55-GD80 is looking to be an incredible tasty motherboard offering loads of features, has a sharp design and obviously was build with overclocking in mind.
With that said .. one last photo. We'd like to thank MSI for supplying this motherboard prior to launch.
Update - We made an error noting that this motherboard had a NF200 PCIe chip, which was a wrong assumption. That text has been removed from this article.
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