Final Words & Conclusion
The Verdict
My goodness -- MSI improved a motherboard that already was extremely good. The Big Bang Trinergy is not just a small update from the initial P55 GD80. No sir, it got overhauled with an updated PCB design and now chucked and stuffed full with core logic to further improve the feature set. I mean -- literally it's hard to find any space on the PCB.
It's a brave and balsy move from MSI really, as when you compare apples to apples and seen from a baseline point of few, the P55 motherboards all perform roughly the same in a default configuration. So the cheapest P55 board you can pick up for say roughly 100 USD. Now the motherboard you have seen today will be selling at roughly 300 USD -- and I'm just wondering .. is that really worth the money ? It's definitely a dilemma as you might as well just go for the X58 platform and a Socket 1366 Core i7 processor to get some extralovin' in the form of triple channel memory as well. Then again, very few X58 motherboards are so horribly good as this P55 motherboard. See, the Trinergy really is a near perfect motherboard.
The feature set is just astonishing, and next to tweaking and the overclocking Walhalla of features and options we get extras. Get this: 12 SATA ports (2 eSATA), the OC Genie, the passively cooled design, the sheer quality of components used, the little Quantum Wave add-on audio board bringing along EAX 5.0 and THX TruStudio PC. Then we of course get 3-way SLI capability thanks an embedded NF200 chip adding another thirty-two PCIe lanes, the V-Check points and Voltage switches and of course the handy OC Dashboard.
Next to that don't forget about the dual-Gigabit Ethernet ports, DDR3 1066/1333/1600/1800/2000/2133 (OC) capability, Coaxial and Optical SPDIFs, 10 SATA2, 2 eSATA, 1 IDE port and the eight USB 2.0 ports in the back. Face it, if this motherboard was a gorgeous girl, you'd fall in love with it -- this motherboard is properly equipped. The one thing that would have made the board perfect would have been integration of USB 3.0 and a SATA3 controller, but perhaps that is wishful thinking.
Now as you have been able to observe, the baseline performance of this P55 motherboards is just top notch, it's ranking and classed in the fastest boards we have tested. But to leave things 'default' as they are would be a real shame with this motherboard. The BIOS offers a wide variety in tweaking and overclocking. If you need to do so at an advanced level with specialized cooling, no worries, the thresholds on voltages, dividers and multipliers are really extensive. The BIOS is a true geek-fest for overclockers. The OC Dashboard might be really handy if you are overclocking with say LN2 and need to increase the base clock frequency quickly and on the fly. Though a bit of a gimmick it's a handy device alright. Of course you could overclock from within Windows with delivered OC software as well.
What we found exceptionaly good with this motherboard is that new OC Genie function. This literally is the reason why we showed you the overclocked results in all our benchmarks. You power down the PC. Then push the OC Genie button. And power on the PC. Now within a second or 15 your PC will start to post really far fetched overclocked. Our 2.93 GHz clocked Core i7 870 processor was then overclocked to 4 GHz while our memory was tweaked to it's rated 1676 MHz CAS -- very close to it's optimal XMP profile. So yeah, that's magic. I really like the OC Genie function. If you need some extra power, use it. If you like to preserve power and do daily things on your PC, leave the PC at default (as if that would be slow with a system like this).
So I'm going to round up now. The MSI Big Bang Trinergy motherboard is stunning in all it's ways, the really nice design, the exceptional arrangement of all components, the quality components, the functions, the wide variety of options, the overclockability, the OC Dashboard, the extra audio options -- and also the price is stunning. It's the one thing that will remain a bit of a downer. Is any P55 motherboard really worth 300 USD ? Do you really need to spend that much dough on a motherboard ? Well, in the end that's a question you guys of course will answer -- whether or not you'll be buying it.
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Bottom line: I'll tell you this though, the Trinergy motherboard is as delicious as the best cake you ever ate -- with a fruity cherry on top of it. This is easily one of the best motherboards we've ever had in our lab -- I'm impressed and it deserves our hard to earn best hardware award. Congratulations to MSI for a job really well done.
