MSI P55 GD65 Review

Stability

As usual we reset the BIOS to its default values and loaded up both Prime 95 torture test and 3DMark 06 looping to see if the board could withstand the stress to CPU, memory and PCI-Express power draw for 24 hours. Apart from a fan to cool the CPU heatsink, there were no other fans used, meaning the heatsink has to withstand very little airflow and still keep cool.

We found the MSI board ran 3DMark06 for the full 24 hours, however Prime95 gave out and closed itself after 15 hours. Overall the system was still stable and usable though, so it's a very good, but partial result for MSI.

Value and Conclusion

MSI has almost nailed a fantastic board, but like the X58 Eclipse we looked at last November, it's just missing a few crucial things. Core features like reset and clear CMOS buttons should absolutely be there if more exotic additions like base-clock and OC Genie buttons are. The weirdly placed seventh SATA seems like a bit of an afterthought, and would have been perfectly placed a lot higher on the board to for SATA optical drives.

The OC Genie is very easy to use, works exactly as advertised, and generates quite a good result for us, although it could use some more aggressive settings perhaps because it's still several hundred MHz short of what we know the board and CPU can do. We realise MSI is most likely playing it safe and the people that are likely to use this simple option will no doubt be chuffed at the free performance gain for all the effort of straightening an index finger and extending an arm.

MSI's power consumption numbers again appear excellent, but we'll hold off saying more than that until we've seen other boards before we make further claims. We do commend MSI for not playing the willy waving numbers game and using a more "normal" set of power hardware to get the job done, but then again, the DrMOS hardware appears to suffer from a more substantial vDroop than the competition under heavily load when overclocked.

Clearly it's closer to "just enough" to get the job done than having an excess. While the board didn't overclock as well as the (much more expensive) Asus, we don't think it was power related so much because it can be successfully compensated with more voltage, and at least more extreme overclockers have the GD80 option to look at too. We also love the V-Check Points, and the base clock buttons work very well, but if we're pedantic we would say that Asus had these on its RoG boards a few years ago. Then again, those never made it off the Asus RoG class until recently.

For the only CPU we currently recommend, the i5-750, we feel enthusiasts will be a little more limited with the GD65. It's certainly "enough", but it could be more in terms of base clock and memory performance. Having oodles of base clock with no total CPU performance is only good if you're looking to stretch your wizard's sleeve on the internet.

Up to this point, evertthing is hunky dory, but what MSI is absolutely missing is some form of BIOS backup and redundency. For a board in 2009 of this cost not to have an efficient BIOS recovery mechanism is sacrilegious. We unluckily bricked one board of the two boards we got (hey, it happens - we get every manufacturer failing at one point or other) using the inbuilt M-Flash program and found the supposed recovery technique was as effective as a chocolate teapot, and didn't even taste half as good. What have we got left? Sending it back to MSI, and if we weren't lucky enough to have them on our speed dial, we'd be thoroughly miffed.


The bottom line is that the layout is great and aesthetically it's fantastic, but we're polarised by MSI's GD65 more than any other board we've seen to date. If it didn't have these silly little oversights it would absolutely be a recommended, even if £130 is quite a lot to part with because it was no more than a good P45 board when they launched. For the most part though, the GD65 is worth it, but its current overclocking capablities might limit Core i5-750 users a little, and the BIOS recovery issue pokes us in a way that moves it away from being a definitive choice to just a strong contender on your short list in a highly competitive market.

• Features
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• 8/10

• Performance
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• 7/10

• Value
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• 7/10

• Overall
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• 8/10

Score Guide