Today I'm going to be having a look at a refresh motherboard from MSI. So this is
the P-55A G55. It's going to be very
similar to their previous P-55 boards except for a couple of things. First of
all, you've got support for SATA 6 GB per second. And second of all, you've
got support for USB 3. This also features their military class concept,
which means you've got top quality components, including icy chokes and
solid caps. So Icy chokes MSI claims run
at up to 20° lower than regular chokes and their solid caps they claim has a
minimum of a 10year lifetime. So it gives you a long lifetime low
temperature which we've covered already as well as high stability and better
overclocking. Let's get this board opened right up and have a look at what
we find inside. We've got a drivers and utilities DVD. We've got uh a users
guide for their hard drive backup software. We've got a quick installation
guide. their users guide for MSI Winky software
control center. So, this is their software for uh system monitoring,
overclocking, and power saving. Gives you a quick guide on how to use it. Ooh,
full color and everything. Look at that. I love seeing full color uh manuals and
pamphlets. It's just uh it's that those extra little touches. Here's their full
user guide, which is in a number of languages. English, Deutsch, France,
I don't know how to pronounce Russian. Okay, we've got an IO shield for the
back, which clearly labels your USB 3.0 ports.
I might point out one SATA cable, uh,
Molex to SATA power adapter, and an IDE cable. That is an odd odd
load of accessories. I would have expected to see maybe like four SATA
cables and then no Molex to SATA power adapter and no IDE cable. That might
have made a little bit more sense. I've actually talked to MSI about that and
they're looking at improving their um their their bundles for future
motherboards. So, yeah. How about that? Okay, let's have a
look at the board itself. The board itself is awesome looking. Okay, really? Hold on. I should go back to this cable
thing. Realistically, if you're anything like me, look at this. You've got a ton
of SATA cables lying around. It doesn't really matter here. I bet I can find
more just in this room. Uh what do we got in here? We got some video cards. We
got some more video cards. Got some SSDs. There we go. Two more SATA cables.
That was hard. Anyway, yeah, SATA cables are not a big deal, but if you've if it
includes them, then great. All right, so let's have a look at the board layout.
First of all, you got your eight pin power connector in its ideal location up on the top left hand edge of the board.
You've got a nice little heat sink on your voltage regulators. Uh down here,
you've got active phase switching power savings. So what this does is it
determines how many CPU how many phases of the power delivery system the CPU is
actually look using and when the CPU is under heavier load it'll enable more of
them for more stable power and when the CPU is under light load it'll actually
disable some for some power savings. So that's a pretty cool feature. Here's
your LG 1156 socket. This is a load socket so you can be assured that it
will make good contact with the pins between uh the motherboard and the pads
on the bottom of the CPU. Next, we have dual channel DDR3 memory support up to
16 gigs presumably. You've got a 24 pin
power connector on the right hand edge of the board exactly where it belongs.
Now, in terms of things that you can plug into this board, we've got six SATA
2. And these are actually in a fairly good layout. I saw these ones here and I
kind of went that might be bad. But it's okay because even if you've got a dual
slot graphics card here, it's only going to cover up to about here, which is
where they're using the right angle connectors. And if you uh need to use
these, you definitely can, even with a card installed here and a card installed
there. So, that should be fine. And then once again, they've got the two SATA 6
GB per second ports also coming right out of the board. And that shouldn't be
a problem either because
the second dual slot graphics card would go here and it would be well out of the
way of that as well. Here's your IDE port. That's a right angle port because
that would be in the way of a top of a bottom graphics card. And then what else
do we have on here? We've got a couple of OC switches. We've got their H clear
SMOS jumper. Then we have a power switch, which is great if you're
benching this board on an open test bench. We've got two front USB headers.
We've got our front panel connectors. So that's for your power switch, LEDs, all
that good stuff. And then we've also got a floppy connector just in case you
still need one of those. The audio connector is down at the very bottom
left of the board uh near the audio chipset which is right here. It's a
realtech chipset. Now in terms of expansion, this is one of the things I
really like about the way MSI engineers their boards. Instead of leaving a spot
here uh like many other manufacturers do
and installing only six uh and installing only six expansion slots on
their motherboards, MSI actually puts the extra work into it
does the routing that's necessary to make sure that they can put a slot right
at the top. And that means that you can install up to seven expansion cards
because really nobody installs seven expansion cards. Very few people. But if
you're installing two dual slot graphics cards, that leaves you with 1 2 3. If
you only have six, that leaves you with only two. And lots of people want to
install three expansion cards besides their graphics versus two. So there you
go. That is why I'm such a big fan of the way MSI does their boards with seven
expansion slots versus only six on many of their competitors. Here's the P-55
chipset that is running this particular board. And then let's move around to the
back where we will see all of our um
input and output on the back panel. So we have optical audio out in a location
that I've never seen it before. But I think the reason they've done this is it
leaves way more room for tons of USB ports. We have a PS2 combo port, eight
USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, uh 1
GB Ethernet, and 7.1 audio out. Thank
you for checking out my unboxing of the P-55A
G55 motherboard from MSI.