MSI P67A-GD65 Intel Socket 1155 Motherboard Performance Review

MSI P67A-GD65 – Intel P67 Mobo

Today we have a chance to take the current top tier Intel P67 “Sandy Bridge” motherboard from MSI for a spin on our bench! My previous experiences with MSI motherboards have always been good ones; this gives me some high expectations for the MSI P67A-GD65! If you haven’t seen the performance of the new Intel second generation Core chips we have seen that they are quite impressive pieces of technology. The MSI P67A-GD65 supports these new processors in the new Intel 1155 socket. The MSI P67A-GD65 comes to market with a very reasonable price of only $179.99 which is a very solid price point to be at! The MSI P67A-GD65 has a lot of great features so we are going to dive right in!

The MSI P67A-GD65 features the latest Military Class II components. The Military Class II technology features Hi-c capacitors, Super Ferrite Chokes, and Solid Capacitors. The Hi-c Caps (highly conductive capacitor) have a life expectancy eight times that of a Solid Capacitor, and have a higher thermal stability. The core of the Hi-c Capacitors features a Tantalum Core which is a rare and highly stable material. Also making up the Military Class II components are Super Ferrite Chokes (SFC). The SFC’s use a Ferrite core that is Super-Permeable. This allows the Super Ferrite Chokes to run at a 35 degree Celsius lower temperature, have a 30% higher current capacity, a 10% improvement in power efficiency and better overclocking power stability. The last component of the Military Class II is Solid Caps (Solid Capacitor). The solid capacitors have an ultra long lifetime in excess of 10 years. Advantages of the solid capacitors include no explosions, low ESR and a lower temperature!

One of the newest and possibly the most noticeable features of the MSI P67A-GD65 is the new BIOS. Instead of the traditional blue BIOS with the various tabs and sub pages that you have to key through, the BIOS are now much more user friendly. In fact, we can now use a mouse to navigate the new Click BIOS! It makes the navigation around the BIOS much easier and that much quicker! Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though; we will have a page dedicated to the new Click BIOS later in the article. For now, take a look at the specifications of the MSI P67A-GD65 and then we will begin the show!

The new MSI Click BIOS isn’t the only feature of the MSI P67A-GD65 worth mentioning! It is also packed with features such as Super Speed USB3 which is ten times faster than USB2.0! It also features support for dual graphics cards from either vendor. Both AMD CrossfireX and NVIDIA SLI technologies are supported, so whether you are a diehard NVIDIA GeForce kinda guy or fanatical about the AMD Radeon HD series the MSI P67A-GD65 has you covered!

MSI P67A-GD65 Specifications:

Socket	1155
CPU (Max Support)	Sandy Bridge
FSB / Hyper Transport Bus	100MHz
Chipset	Intel P67
DDR3 Memory	DDR3 1066/1333/1600/2133
Memory Channel	Dual
DIMM Slots	4
Max Memory (GB)	32GB
PCI-Ex16	2
PCI-E Gen 2.0	Gen2 (1×16, 1×8)
PCI-Ex1	3
PCI	2
SATAIII	4
SATAII	4
RAID	0/1/5/10
LAN	10/100/1000
TPM	1
USB 3.0 ports (Rear)	2
USB 2.0 ports (Rear)	8
Audio ports (Rear)	6+Coaxial/Optical SPDIF
1394 ports (Rear)	1
eSATA	2
Form Factor	ATX
DrMOS	Yes
APS	Yes
SLI	Yes
CrossFire	Yes

Now that you have seen the preview, including the specifications of the MSI P67A-GD65, we can begin the feature film! Starting out we will take a look at the Retail packaging and bundle of the MSI P67A-GD65!