Today on Linus Tech Tips, we're going to be unboxing the MSI P67A
GD55. As you can see from the front of the box, there's a few things that MSI has
to say for themselves about this board right off the bat. First of all,
military class 2. This is a hugely important concept for MSI on their
motherboards as well as on their video cards. So military class means they're
using very high quality components on the board in order to enable a 10 plus
year lifetime as well as excellent power delivery to your CPU which is one of the
most important features for the P67A chipset boards. It also has a three-year
warranty in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
It features their OCG2 oneb button overclocking which is convenient if you
want a uh like a quick and dirty overclock versus tuning it yourself.
Although you will get more out of tuning it yourself. We have four USB 3.0 ports,
two SATA 6 Gbit per second ports, support for NVIDIA SLI technology, as
well as well, they're calling it ATI Crossfire X, but I guess it's AMD
Crossfire X these days. Um, not a whole lot to speak of on the back. They have
their Winky 3 um BIOS utility for going
online. We actually tried it. It's a Firefox browser in case you're
wondering. And then there's uh also their UEFI BIOS. So that is a graphical
BIOS interface for this board versus the older uh like a W style BIOS with just
you know arrows and enter and plus minus to change all of your options. We have a
drivers and utilities DVD. Throw it away. We have a quick installation
guide. We have a user guide for the software applications. We have a full
user guide for the motherboard itself. This is the Europe version, so I'm
assuming that includes English somewhere along the line. Okay, we also have an
SLI bridge. Remember, if you do need a Crossfire bridge, it should come with
your graphics card. We have an IO shield, which is black, which I like.
Like everything to be sort of, you know, black and sleek looking. We have four
SATA cables included, two right angle and two straight. And then we also have
a Molex to SATA power adapter just in case you have an older power supply that
only has a single harness with SATA power connectors on it. We have their
convenient M connector which allows you to plug in all your front panel connectors to that and then plug the
whole brick into your motherboard at one time for easier installation.
Here is the board itself, the P67A GD55.
So the D in the name means that this is part of their gaming series. Uh, from
what I've seen so far, the G series boards, what differentiates them from
the C series P67 boards is that they do
have support for their dual 16x PCI
Express slots to run in 8X 8X mode for SLI and Crossfire. So, I'm going to go
ahead and remove this sticker. And we're going to start in the middle of the
board where the LGA 1155 socket is.
Around the edge of the board, you're going to see we have a 6 + one phase
power design on this particular military class board. Up in the top left, we've
got our 8 pin power connector in its ideal location because most cases have
uh routing option, well, most high-end cases have routing options for that cable to come up this way. We've got our
CPU power connector. And then we've got four DDR3
module slots supporting dual channel. We
have Oh, look at this. This is interesting. No, come up here and have a
look at this. So, we have um it looks like we have voltage read points, but we
don't have the convenient uh interface soldered onto it that you would see on
the higherend GD65 board. So, you can
probably still like put a multimeter on there. I'm just not quite sure if
that'll work. All right. So, we've got a 24 pin power connector in its ideal
location on the right hand edge of the board. And then we have our SATA ports.
So, here we have all supported off of the Intel chipset. two SATA 6 gigbit per
second ports and four SATA 3 Gbit per
second ports. We have uh what is a very
lowprofile chipset cooler. And then moving down the board, we have our OC
Genie button. Remember that is a toggle switch, so on off. We have our reset and
power buttons. And then we have support for front USB, front fire wire, and
front USB 3.0. So that's a pretty cool
thing to have. Our slot layout is the same as the GD65 version.
Just going to move that. We have two PCI slots, two PCIe 16X physical slots, so
those are going to run in either 16x mode or 8x8x mode if you're running
both. And three PCI 1x slots. So, if you're using two dual slot graphics
cards, which is sort of the most likely configuration for Crossfire SLI, you're
going to be left with one two PCIe1X slots and one PCI slot for any
additional expansion that you want to do. So, now let's have a look at the IO
shield on the back. The This is one of my favorite things. You got that combo
mouse, keyboard, PS2 port. You have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 eight USB 2.0 ports, a clear
SIMO switch, which I love. I love this feature. Although I have yet to need to
clear the SIMOS on a P67 board, we have
support for digital audio in both optical and coaxial flavors, FireWire,
gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports on
the back panel, as well as 7.1 audio
out. Cameraman wants to have a look at the cooling solution on the MOSFETs,
which is actually pretty slick looking. I really like it. Once you peel off the
plastic, there's actually quite a shiny, glossy finish to the blue that is on
those. And I really like the overall color scheme of this board. Although it
seems trivial, I am a shallow person.
What can I say? The back of the board looks like the back of pretty much any
LG 1155 or 1156 board. Don't forget if
you are buying a CPU for this motherboard, make sure you're buying a
Core i3, i5, or i7 with 1,155
contact points on the back, not 1156. It
only supports LG1 1155 CPUs. Thank you
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