Meet the MSI P55-GD80

Meet the MSI P55-GD80 - Hello World!

So my fellow Guru's let's meet and greet the MSI P55-GD80 motherboard. We already stated that this motherboard is MSI's most high-end P55 offering, and it shows off alright, the board is just LOADED with extra features.

Next to the six standard SATA II ports an additional JMicron controller provides two internal and one external SATA ports, and one IDE connector. Two gigabit Ethernet connections, 8-channel audio, Firewire, and 14 USB ports make for the rest of the package. Other specs include support for 4 x DDR3-2133 memory allowing up-to 16GB to be installed, 3 PCIe x16 slots for SLI and CrossfireX (limited to an 8/8/4 setup though), 8 SATA ports, 1 eSATA port, 14 USB 2.0 ports, Dual Gbit/s LAN, 8-channel audio.

And that's really just the regular stuff. The motherboard also uses a 14-phase power circuit with standard solid-state capacitors. This board has a lot of overclock friendly features, such as on-board controls for clock-speeds, clear-CMOS, OC-Genie, a DIP switch to control voltages, and voltage-sensing points that make measuring voltages convenient. Let's talk through some of the most extraordinary ones.

Extraordinary features:

• OC Genie / DirectOC - embedded on the motherboard is a small extra ASIC. It is controlled by a number of buttons. Directly in Windows you can use up/down button to dynamically in- or decrease processor speeds. We tried this and it works really handy. This is marketed as DirectOC, especially handy in overclock competitions where you need to alter things on the fly.
  More prominent though is the OC Genie button. If you do not like to overclock yourself or have two left cyber hands, the OC Genie will do that task for you. Before you power on the PC, you press the OC Genie button. Then your motherboard will start overclocking all by itself. Increased voltages, timings, processor and memory speeds .. it does it all and does that well. Example. A Core i7 870 processor at default runs at 2.9 GHz. The OC Genie automatically overclocked it towards 3.7 GHz. We'll show you some examples later on in this article.
• Superpipe -- MSI implemented it's Superpipe cooling onto this motherboard. A completely passive design with nice 8mm thick heatpipes. It will keep the temperatures in very safe ranges, and works out really well even when the system is overclocked massively. It looks great, but best of all .. it doesn't make any noise.
• DrMOS - DrMOS is short for Driver-MOSFET; they differ from standard MOSFETs in that it is a 3-in-1 design with the Driver IC, top MOSFET, and bottom MOSFET all in one package. Because of this 3-in-1 design, transmission distance between components is smaller, electrical noise is reduced and there is less power used.  DrMOS has a 1000kHz switching frequency (ie: frequency at which the MOSFETs are switched on & off), which is roughly 4 times faster than traditional MOSFETs.  You could say that MSI implemented a server class power design for this motherboard. It has 14 active power phases. This is more efficient, better for overclocking and thus also better for overall stability.
• V-Kit - MSI's new V-Kit concept allowing Voltage monitoring and manipulation.. It was already to be found at their GTX260/275 Lightning series graphics cards, but it is extended towards the motherboards as well. MSI creates voltage measuring points for various voltages used by the motherboards. Also additional V-Switches can be found, allowing further overvolting of CPU VCore, VTT, DDR VCC and P55.
• Debug LEDs - you'll spot two of them. Displaying error cores and processor temperatures.
• APS - notable is that the board has APS, which is short for Active Phase Switching. Much like DES on the Gigabyte motherboards it can en/disable power phases on demand. And that means much better power saving. MSI claims up-to 27% actually. On the motherboard you'll find a series of Power Phase LEDs as well, displaying  the active phases.
• BIOS - we'll show it in the review, but expect easy to navigate, understand and advanced BIOS features.
• Three PCie graphics ports - Support for 3x PCie, though arranged in 8x/8x/4x.

But before summing up all features becomes a tad too boring. let's just head on over to the next page where we'll show you everything there is to be seen on on this motherboard. after which we'll show you a couple of overclocking samples followed by a good set of benchmarks.