MSI P67A-GD65 Preview

MSI P67 and H67 motherboards

On top of letting us get our hands on its tasty new P67 hardware, MSI sent us pics detailing its current entire range of P67 and H67 motherboards, so go grab a cup of tea and take a gander:

MSI P67A-GD55

The GD55 appears to use the same PCB as the GD65, but drops the voltage measurement points, extra SATA 6Gbps and eSATA ports, as well as the heatpipe between the CPU VRM heatsinks.

Importantly though it keeps the two high-speed PCI-E slots, so it'll still support SLI and CrossFireX.

MSI P67A-C45

The C45 uses a different, thinner PCB to save money, but it's still ATX and has with four USB 3 ports, including the front panel headers, Firewire, a single Gigabit Ethernet port and S/PDIF audio outputs. Although the on-board buttons have been dropped, one pair of the SATA 3Gbps ports have been mounted parallel with the PCB for neat cabling.

There's only a single 16x PCI-E slot, and MSI has swapped out the High-C caps for solid capacitors instead - not that it'll yield a big difference we expect.

MSI H67MA-ED55

Now for the H67 models - these all comes with display outputs on the rear I/O block, including dual-link DVI-D, HDMI and D-sub. It's noteworthy that despite their anticipated lower price, none of MSI's H67 motherboards has a PCI slot, opting for PCI-E instead.

Although all the H67 boards are micro-ATX, the ED55 retains many of enthusiast features from the P67A-GD65, including on-board power/reset buttons, voltage measurement points, dual-BIOS and the full 'DrMOS, SFC coke, High C capacitor and heatsinks with heatpipe' equation for the CPU.

However it's powered by just a 4-pin ATX12V sockety, and is missing front panel USB 3 headers. Despite having two 16x PCI-E slots, the H67MA-ED55 doesn't support SLI or CrossFireX, but that's case with all H67 boards.

MSI H67MA-E45/H67MS-E43

The E45/E43 are MSI's most basic boards and are built around the same PCB. They both forgo a lot of the extra hardware of the other models in the range - including aesthetic goodies like heatsinks for the CPU VRMs, although the E45 has Firewire and two rear-mounted USB 3 ports.