Gallery - MSI P55-GD80 motherboard
From left to right that's a PS2 keyboard and mouse connector. Then I count a total of seven USB 2.0 ports, 1x firewire,1x eSATA with power plug, 2x Gigabit Ethernet. Digital audio in the form of coaxial and optical TOSLINK connectors, and then all the way to the right the Analog audio connectors. Well, that certainly is a good start; that back panel is certainly stuffed with goodies.
Audio is managed by Realtek's HD audio chipset (the slightly more expensive ALC889), 8-channel. Completely Blu-ray ready, but then again anything with a pass-through is.
When we flip the board around we stumble into the processor area. We spot the 8-pin CPU power header to the right; see ferrite core chokes and obviously the all new Socket 1156 for Lynnfield based processors.
The GD80 has a 14-phase Dr.MOS PWM design with 8 phases alone for the processor; that should be more than enough for overclocking and tweaking, 2 for VTT, 2 for memory and 2 for the P55 PCH (platform controller hub).
Notable is that the board has APS, which is short for Active Phase Switching. Much like say DES on the Gigabyte motherboards, it can en/dis-able power phases depending on load. And that means better power saving. MSI claims up-to 27% actually. The board incorporates the latest durable components like solid capacitor ferrite core chokes, quality components .. who doesn't like that ?
Only the best selection in components is spotted here. Below the processor socket you can spot the dual-channel DIMM slots, DDR3.
Once we flip the board around once more we again stumble into the DIMM slots, DDR3 of course. It really is a bit of a shame that Intel decided to leave triple channel memory only available to Core i7 related products.
We'll be using a nice color matching Corsair DDR3 Dominator kit for this test.
The kit is specced at 1600 MHz / 1.65v and carries timings of 8:8:8:24. Of course it's Corsair memory, so we certainly would be able to go higher on the frequency, or lower in timings. We'll do some memory tests in our benchmark session though.
One thing is certain, the Core i5/i7 series will maximize bandwidth, and even at dual-channel with Core i5, that will be a lot of bandwidth alright, our tests/benchmarks later on in this article will show and proof that.
