MSI P67A-GD65 Review

Testing Methods

With the exception of ATTO, which we use to measure the performance of a motherboard's SATA controllers, all of our benchmarks use real applications that give you a great idea of how well a product fares when performing the tasks for which you're likely to use it.

We test with our own Media Benchmarks suite, which can be downloaded so that you can test your own system. It uses a combination of Gimp image editing, H.264 encoding with Handbrake and multi-tasking with 7-zip file compression combined with HD video playback. Finally, for our game testing we benchmark the board running Crysis, and record the minimum and average frame rates.

Our benchmarks include stable overclocked results too, so you can gauge how much performance potential there is in the motherboard, and how much value this adds to your purchase.

Test Setup:

Motherboards:

• MSI P67A-GD65 (Intel LGA1155)
  
• Asus P8P67 (Intel LGA1155)

Common Components:

• Intel Core i5-2500K (32nm, 6MB L3 cache, 32x100MHz; 3.2GHz)
  
• 4GB DDR3 1,600MHz C8 at motherboard SPD settings
  
• ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB
  
• PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA hard disk
  
• Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (used for storage controller tests only)
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
  
• ATI Catalyst 10.112 WHQL

Overclocked Settings:

• Asus P8P67 - 4.9GHz, 104.7MHz Base Clock, 47x multiplier, 1,675MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 8-8-8-24-74-1T
  
• MSI P67A-GD65 - 4.9GHz, 104.7MHz Base Clock, 47x multiplier, 1,675MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 8-8-8-24-74-1T