MSI P67A-GD65 Review

Performance Analysis

At stock speeds, the performance of the GD65 was excellent, edging ahead of the Asus board in every test – although only marginally. Its overall Media Benchmark score, for example, was just 2 per cent quicker than that of the Asus P8P67. In gaming, however, the MSI board managed a minimum frame rate of 37fps in Crysis compared to the 34fps of the Asus board.

We then tried overclocking the GD65, and dived into the EFI system to see what we could get out of our Core i5-2500K.


The GD65’s EFI system allowed us to turn off EIST and Turbo Boost when overclocking our chip, but there were a few frustrating niggles. Adjusting the voltages running through the GD65 is awkward, for example, as the BIOS doesn’t show the current value for all the voltages. This means that you have no idea whether you’re increasing or decreasing the voltage.

The board didn’t deal with bad overclocks very well either, and simply booted into Windows with the CPU reset to its default settings. This meant that we had to wait for Windows to boot and then run CPU-Z to see if our overclock had been applied; if not, we had to reset the system and try again, which was very annoying.


Eventually, we persuaded the GD65 to run our test chip at the same 4.9GHz clock as the P8P67, which we achieved with the same 47x CPU multiplier and 104MHz Base Clock. This required us to raise the vcore to 1.34V, the CPU IO to 1.12V and the System Agent voltage to 1.25V.

The effect of this on the board’s performance was dramatic, with the overall Media Benchmark score rocketing to 2,630 and gaming performance seeing a 9fps minimum frame rate boost. With these scores, the MSI maintained its slim lead over the competing Asus board.

Conclusion

The P67A-GD65 is good but falls short of greatness. Overclocking it is a chore, although MSI tells us it’s addressing this. The price works against it too, and while voltage readout points and on-board power switches are desirable, you won’t use them every day. We’d recommend buying the Asus P8P67 over the GD65.

• Performance
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• -
• 9/10

• Features
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• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
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• x
• x
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• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Overall
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• -
• -
• 8/10

Score Guide