MSI P55-GD85 LGA 1156 Intel Motherboard Review

P55 GD-85 Box and BIOS Images

The box for the P55-GD85 looks very similar to the P55-GD65 we saw back in December with the P55 roundup. I’ll be echoing myself in saying I like the box art and the organized rows of decals stating precisely what you are purchasing.

The bundle of peripherals contains all the cables needed to populate the board with hard-drives along with an SLI connector for dual-card SLI.

Here’s the main menu to the MSI P55-GD85 BIOS. They handily put the BIOS revision at the bottom of the screen. I’m using the 1.1 version which is the most recent.

The hardware monitor tab has the normal suspects such as CPU temperature, CPU vcore, and power supply voltages.

While I’m not exactly won over by MSI’s Green Power and their competition’s various systems for disabling PWM phases, I do find the information presented on this tab interesting. Just because of my love for numbers and minute bits of information do I mention this tab. 38.5 watts from the CPU idling in BIOS seems surprisingly high, even at 1.35v. Redrawing that blue screen must be tough work. Ahh jokes..

This is the first of three images detailing the Cell Menu. Within this menu are all the settings necessary for overclocking the system. I have shown the images with the maximum permissible values.

Here you can adjust the memory and QPI settings. There is also a memory timings sub menu; we’ll dive into that in a bit.

Voltages galore! Perfect for the 32nm Clarkdale processors. MSI could perhaps even offer 2.2vcore for those that like their silicon extra crispy.

You have access to all the timings, sub-timings, and Read/Write settings. Unfortunately, I couldn’t determine a way to duplicate the channels so you have to manually set the timings for each channel. Luckily, there are only two channels; life could be worse.

After you spend all that time dutifully tweaking memory timings you had better save them to a profile. MSI provides 6 profiles with the ability to give them a custom name and a short description.