Gallery - MSI P55-GD80 motherboard

Gallery - MSI P55-GD80 motherboard

Recently MSI introduced their new V-Kit concept allowing Voltage monitoring and manipulation.. It was already to be found at their GTX260 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.

All the way to the left you can see DIP-switches, with the dip-switch next to the Voltage control points, you can actually increase the voltage at hardware level breaking the BIOS limits with another 0.2 Volts.

Voltage monitoring -- Here's the idea, you stick a wire onto a positive and ground pin and that allows you to check out voltages with a multimeter. Let me show you:

MSI's V-Kit will not be exclusive for the most expensive models but according to the source, MSI will equip all of its P55 motherboards with this V-Kit. Above you can see how that works, we are tapping the CPU rails by the way.

Overall board design is great by the way. Everything is positioned really well. But let's move onward to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors.

The P55-GD80 features six right-angle SATA II (3Gb/s) ports which are supplied by the P55 chipset and they support AHCI and RAID 0/1/5/10. In addition to the regular six SATA II ports, colored in blue we see two additional SATA ports,  powered by a  JMicron JMB322 controller. These they support RAID 0/1 and JBOD. A JMicron JMB363 controller supplies the IDE port and the eSATA/USB combo port on the I/O panel.