The BIOS

The MSI P55-GD80 uses the familiar AMI BIOS. There was a time I wasn't wild about it but over time it has grown on me. Since we're familiar with it, for the most part, the BIOS is similar to many other boards we've worked with, even when they are from different manufacturers. The menu is very intuitive, with each option opening a new page with further options for modification. Most of the items are straight forward, but there are a few areas of note. The Advanced BIOS features page is the first place you would go to to configure the boot order and some of the basic chipset features. You can enable or disable the boot logo as well as choosing a quick boot or something more verbose.

The H/W Monitor is an often neglected, but very important page in that you can keep close tabs on how your system is doing with temperatures, voltages and fan operation. While this page has never "saved" me, it is something I pay attention to on a fairly regular basis, especially on initial build to make sure I didn't miss something.

The Green Power page is where we choose how we want the system to act when we have enabled Green Power. If used, the defaults are a good place to start, remember, while you want to be green, you still need to get your work done.

The Cell Menu page is where the fun really begins. It is here where the majority of tweaks and tricks are done to improve performance. You can adjust the CPU FSB or ratio, if your processor is unlocked. There are several sub-menus for CPU and Memory manipulation, If doing things manually scares you, MSI's OC Genie is designed to automatically adjust CPU/Memory to maximize system performance. You have the ability to store OC setups, be them via OC Genie or manual OC's.

The M-Flash page is where you would update the BIOS using either a USB Flash Disk or an internal hard drive (Fat/Fat32 requirement to be read).

The Overclocking Profile page is where your OC's are stored for your quick retrieval, I would store at least one OC here so that you have all of your tweaks and settings pre-set, ready to roll. The stored OC's can be either manual or OC Genie configured.

Installing the OS

Well, this is actually a two step process, as I am installing Windows 7 (32 bit) and Ubuntu 9.10. Windows 7 went without an hitch, the Driver CD did not have Windows 7 drivers, so I downloaded them directly from the MSI website. Once into Windows I installed MSI's Live Update, this allowed me to make sure all of my firmware / drivers are the latest offered by MSI / Intel.

As you can see, Live Update was out of date and had to be updated :) All of my other drivers were current, including the 1.5 BIOS I had installed shortly after receiving the motherboard.

Ubuntu 9.10 did not install as smoothly, it booted into the GUI from the LiveCD just fine, once there I could see my HD, which was still formatted NTFS, but for some reason when I launched the installer it could not identify any drives on my system. I booted directly into the install and once again, the Ubuntu Disk Manager could not see my Seagate HD. I moved the drive from the P55 SATA ports to the JMicron SATA ports to no avail. I finally downloaded the minimal install image, booted that from floppy and did a net-install of Ubuntu, that went flawless. The nice thing about building this way is that you get the latest on first boot, there typically is no other updates required, outside of ATI / nV driver updates of course.

Test Setup:

The MSI P55-GD80 will be equipped with an Intel i5 750 clocked at 2.66GHz, 4GB of Patriot Sector 5 DDR3-2000, Seagate Barracuda 320GB, and an HIS IceQ3 3850 for our video needs. Windows 7 Ultimate is the OS of choice, fully patched up to the time of testing.

The comparison motherboard will be the MSI X58 Platinum with identical hardware save for the CPU (i7 920 @ 2.66GHz) and Memory (6GB SuperTalent DDR3-1600).

While the comparison system has more memory, all tests were run on 32 bit OS's, therefore negating the possible extra memory advantage.

The software used is as follows:

– We tested CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia.

: Once again, a few CPU tests along with some memory bandwidth tests.

a plethora of Linux based tests that give us a nice look into performance of the motherboard as a whole.

DVD Shrink: We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Left 4 Dead – A little added test here. We have all heard that the Intel i5 CPU controls the PCIe lanes, therefore no SB. Lets see how a like speed Intel i7 compares when running a timedemo from Left 4 Dead, just for grins of course...

All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each platform. Despite the differences between the motherboards, we matched the tweaks as close as possible. The drivers otherwise were identical.