MSI P55A-G55 Core i5 SLI Ready DDR3 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,258 words · ~6 min read
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Today I'm going to be having a look at a refresh motherboard from MSI. So this is
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the P-55A G55. It's going to be very
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similar to their previous P-55 boards except for a couple of things. First of
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all, you've got support for SATA 6 GB per second. And second of all, you've
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got support for USB 3. This also features their military class concept,
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which means you've got top quality components, including icy chokes and
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solid caps. So Icy chokes MSI claims run
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at up to 20° lower than regular chokes and their solid caps they claim has a
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minimum of a 10year lifetime. So it gives you a long lifetime low
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temperature which we've covered already as well as high stability and better
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overclocking. Let's get this board opened right up and have a look at what
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we find inside. We've got a drivers and utilities DVD. We've got uh a users
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guide for their hard drive backup software. We've got a quick installation
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guide. their users guide for MSI Winky software
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control center. So, this is their software for uh system monitoring,
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overclocking, and power saving. Gives you a quick guide on how to use it. Ooh,
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full color and everything. Look at that. I love seeing full color uh manuals and
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pamphlets. It's just uh it's that those extra little touches. Here's their full
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user guide, which is in a number of languages. English, Deutsch, France,
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I don't know how to pronounce Russian. Okay, we've got an IO shield for the
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back, which clearly labels your USB 3.0 ports.
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I might point out one SATA cable, uh,
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Molex to SATA power adapter, and an IDE cable. That is an odd odd
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load of accessories. I would have expected to see maybe like four SATA
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cables and then no Molex to SATA power adapter and no IDE cable. That might
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have made a little bit more sense. I've actually talked to MSI about that and
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they're looking at improving their um their their bundles for future
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motherboards. So, yeah. How about that? Okay, let's have a
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look at the board itself. The board itself is awesome looking. Okay, really? Hold on. I should go back to this cable
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thing. Realistically, if you're anything like me, look at this. You've got a ton
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of SATA cables lying around. It doesn't really matter here. I bet I can find
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more just in this room. Uh what do we got in here? We got some video cards. We
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got some more video cards. Got some SSDs. There we go. Two more SATA cables.
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That was hard. Anyway, yeah, SATA cables are not a big deal, but if you've if it
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includes them, then great. All right, so let's have a look at the board layout.
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First of all, you got your eight pin power connector in its ideal location up on the top left hand edge of the board.
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You've got a nice little heat sink on your voltage regulators. Uh down here,
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you've got active phase switching power savings. So what this does is it
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determines how many CPU how many phases of the power delivery system the CPU is
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actually look using and when the CPU is under heavier load it'll enable more of
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them for more stable power and when the CPU is under light load it'll actually
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disable some for some power savings. So that's a pretty cool feature. Here's
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your LG 1156 socket. This is a load socket so you can be assured that it
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will make good contact with the pins between uh the motherboard and the pads
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on the bottom of the CPU. Next, we have dual channel DDR3 memory support up to
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16 gigs presumably. You've got a 24 pin
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power connector on the right hand edge of the board exactly where it belongs.
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Now, in terms of things that you can plug into this board, we've got six SATA
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2. And these are actually in a fairly good layout. I saw these ones here and I
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kind of went that might be bad. But it's okay because even if you've got a dual
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slot graphics card here, it's only going to cover up to about here, which is
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where they're using the right angle connectors. And if you uh need to use
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these, you definitely can, even with a card installed here and a card installed
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there. So, that should be fine. And then once again, they've got the two SATA 6
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GB per second ports also coming right out of the board. And that shouldn't be
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a problem either because
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the second dual slot graphics card would go here and it would be well out of the
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way of that as well. Here's your IDE port. That's a right angle port because
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that would be in the way of a top of a bottom graphics card. And then what else
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do we have on here? We've got a couple of OC switches. We've got their H clear
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SMOS jumper. Then we have a power switch, which is great if you're
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benching this board on an open test bench. We've got two front USB headers.
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We've got our front panel connectors. So that's for your power switch, LEDs, all
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that good stuff. And then we've also got a floppy connector just in case you
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still need one of those. The audio connector is down at the very bottom
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left of the board uh near the audio chipset which is right here. It's a
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realtech chipset. Now in terms of expansion, this is one of the things I
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really like about the way MSI engineers their boards. Instead of leaving a spot
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here uh like many other manufacturers do
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and installing only six uh and installing only six expansion slots on
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their motherboards, MSI actually puts the extra work into it
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does the routing that's necessary to make sure that they can put a slot right
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at the top. And that means that you can install up to seven expansion cards
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because really nobody installs seven expansion cards. Very few people. But if
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you're installing two dual slot graphics cards, that leaves you with 1 2 3. If
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you only have six, that leaves you with only two. And lots of people want to
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install three expansion cards besides their graphics versus two. So there you
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go. That is why I'm such a big fan of the way MSI does their boards with seven
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expansion slots versus only six on many of their competitors. Here's the P-55
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chipset that is running this particular board. And then let's move around to the
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back where we will see all of our um
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input and output on the back panel. So we have optical audio out in a location
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that I've never seen it before. But I think the reason they've done this is it
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leaves way more room for tons of USB ports. We have a PS2 combo port, eight
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USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, uh 1
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GB Ethernet, and 7.1 audio out. Thank
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you for checking out my unboxing of the P-55A
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G55 motherboard from MSI.