OverClocking

The MSI P55-GD80 gives you several options for overclocking. Our first foray was using the on board OC Genie, this uses an ASIC to determine the best OC. We found the ASIC was a little conservative, but for good reason in the long run. While we posted a higher OC manually, we payed for it in the smell of burned CPU... Luckily it was short lived and our CPU is fine, but we definitely hit the upper threshold with stock cooling.

As you can see, 3.13GHz via the OC Genie is nothing to sneeze at, and it allowed tempuratures to get rather high as well, looking at our manual OC, you see why OC Genie stopped there. We netted an impressive 3.7GHz tweaking by hand, granted, you NEVER want to 97C as a top temp while benchmarking, so unless you have better cooling, best to stay in the 3GHz range. I sincerely feel that with proper cooling this motherboard could easily garner a 4GHz boot and test.

Final Words

While the P55 sports itself as the budget minded upgrade, I would state that performance, at least with the P55-GD80, is still very much there. Add to that a very full offering and your budget solution doesn't feel, well, budget like. While the X58 Platinum outperforms in raw CPU power, one of the most important, to this reviewer and many readers I am sure, is gaming performance. In that aspect, the P55-GD80 stands above the X58. Sure there are a few shortcomings, Dual DDR3 instead of Triple, 4 memory slots instead of 6, but how many of us will actually require that extra 2GB or extra slots? While 64 bit is here and working well, most gamers I come across are still trotting along happily on 32 bit machines without a worry.

If stock performance is not enough for you, overclocking is a snap with the P55-GD80. By simply pressing a button we were able to reach 3.13GHz on stock air, which isn't all that far from where we could get using manual tweaks.

continues to impress me further with each board I have gotten to review. Their quality has been second to none and their willingness to allow hackers to tweak the board to the ultimate limits is worthy of praise. When you put this all together, you have a motherboard that looks great, overclocks well for beginners while leaving the manual pieces available for the tweakers and is loaded with a plethora of options. I don't know about you, but that's a Win Win in my book.

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