MSI X58A-GD65 Review

Performance Analysis

Given that the GD65 is the cheapest X58 board we’ve ever tested, we were intrigued to see how it performed. Would its performance live up to its bargain basement price tag or would it surprise us all? Well, to be honest it’s a little of both.

The score of 1,412 in our image editing test when at stock speeds was the worst result we’ve seen for a while, falling a good 100 points behind the better X58 boards we’ve seen. If you did a lot of image editing you’d get your work done 6 per cent quicker if you were using an Asus Sabertooth instead, for example. Fortunately things picked up for the GD65 in our video encoding test as it drew to within just a few points of the other boards we’ve tested.

Multi-tasking proved to be something of a weakness for the GD65; our tests put it at some 7 per cent slower than the excellent Asus P6X58D-E. These results gave the GD65 an overall score of 2,010, which puts it near the bottom of our performance table, 55 points behind the Sabertooth and nearly 100 points behind the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R. This may look like a poor result, but realistically 2,010 is still a reasonable score: any PC built around the GD65 and a Core i7 CPU is still going to be quick.


Unfortunately, the results we saw when we overclocked the GD65 were a little disappointing as the board failed to make up any ground on its marginally more expensive competitors. Its overall score when running out test chip at 4.4GHz was 2,485 which is again 50 points behind the Sabertooth and just over 100 points behind the D-E.

Gaming performance wasn’t a massive success for the GD65 either, as it sat in the middle of the pack both at stock and overclocked speeds. This is a pretty good result for such a budget board, but its achievements are overshadowed somewhat by the Sabertooth which costs only £20 more and is noticeably quicker in games.


Our recent SATA 6Gbps speed tests showed that not all SATA 6Gbps ports are born equal, and the GD65 demonstrates this fact nicely. The SATA 6Gbps ports on the GD65 are the worst we’ve ever seen, delivering a read speed of only 149MB/sec and an appalling write speed of 86MB/sec. We ran the test a number of times, even formatting the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB drive we use, but the speeds remained abysmally slow. It’s shocking that you won’t even get the best out of a hard disk attached to the SATA 6Gbps ports of the GD65, let alone an SSD.

Conclusion

Clearly the GD65 isn’t the quickest X58 board we’ve had through our labs. Granted, it does have price in its favour, as it’s nearly £20 less than any other X58 board we’ve seen, but you’d be wrong to dwell on this point too much. This is mainly because you can get so much more by just spending them few extra quid. The Asus Sabertooth X58 performs better in games and applications and has quicker SATA ports to boot, not to mention the fact that it looks better and comes with a longer warranty.

The GD65 is only attractive to those building an LGA1366 system on the very tightest of budgets, but doing so doesn't make sense – the CPUs and triple-channel memory are hardly cheap, so adding £20 to the build price isn’t a significant amount to get the best from these premium components. If you really can’t spend the extra £20, an LGA1156 system might be a better option, as is waiting to see what Intel’s forthcoming mid-range Sandy Bridge CPUs bring in early January. Either way, the GD65 doesn’t quite make it onto our Christmas wish list.

• Performance
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• -
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• 7/10

• Features
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• -
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• 7/10

• Value
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• -
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• 8/10

• Overall
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• -
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• 7/10

Score Guide