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The MSI P67A-GD65 arrives in blue and white box which highlights the use of ‘Military Class II' components. We have covered this many times before on KitGuru. MSI use HI-C Capacitors with Tantalum cores which extremely high conductivity and up to 15x less leakage. This is apparently the same material which is used on Space Shuttles. MSI are also utilising Super Ferrite Chokes with 10% better power efficiency and 30% higher current capacity. This can aid the overclocking capabilities.
The bundle is comprehensive, with driver discs, literature on the product, back plate, converter cables, sata cables, SLI cable and a USB 3.0 adapter.
The ATX board layout is mainly positive with plenty of room around the CPU for oversized coolers.
MSI include overclocking ‘friendly' features, such as the onboard power and reset buttons, and an OC Genie button. There is also a clear CMOS button on the rear I/O panel, which is just as well because a dual slot graphics card covers the CMOS switch and makes removing the CMOS battery impossible when fitted. This is a bizarre decision, but thankfully it is slightly negated by the rear mounted button.
Thera are eight SATA ports on the board, four of which support SATA 6Gbps. They are well positioned in a parallel configuration meaning they take up the least amount of room possible.
As we discussed earlier, the CPU socket has a lot of space around it, thanks to MSI reducing the size of the cooling sinks.
There are two PCI-E Slots. One will operate in 16x, but if two are connected it drops to 8x speed. There are two PCI slots and a single 1x PCI-E slot. The board can take a maximum of 32GB of DDR3 over the four slots at speeds up to 2,400mhz. Sound is covered by Intel HD Audio across the Realtek ALc892, offering 8 channel support. Networking is handled by the Realtek 8111E Gigabit Ethernet connection.
Rear connectivity is strong, with 8 USB 2.0 ports (14 total) and 2 USB 3.0 ports available. There are also two eSATA connectors, a reset CMOS switch, a PS2 port for older devices, gigabit lan and Firewire. Audio out, line in, mic, optical S/PDIF and coaxial out are also present.
I dont think this is one of their best boards, loads of complaints about it online. noticed quite a few threads in forums I frequent.
do NOT touch this board http://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=144484.new;topicseen#new
things like.. just clicking on “spread spectrum” to disable it crashes the bios. So far all I have gotten from their tech support is “please try this new bios 1.8b5” which has the same issue.
A very glowing review really for a board with a lot of issues. I had two of these and complained so much I got a refund then bought an ASUS. much better. the bios is fucked.
Amazing if this would work the way they think it will. it will assuredly stop ‘mistakes’ which seem to hit newspapers all the time.
opps sorry, wrong story post above urghhhh
I have this board, and it has worked ok for me. I can’t overclock anyway, so the button does what I need. ive a 2500k at over 4ghz. Ive no idea how to get it there manually, so I cant complain.
@ Frannie. Hey man, does your 2500k run ok? I saw a thread on anandtech and a user used the auto settings and the cpu was getting alot more voltage than it needed. you might want to check in the bios its not overvolting too much…….
OCGenie is pure garbage. If you want to OC ANY MSI board don’t bother with OCG. Do it manually, old-school way.
With P67 you will be better of with (even) AsRock or Intel OEM board than with MSI.
Hey Suchet, I looked in the bios and temperatures are 50c? is that ok ?
I don’t prefer usually MSI as a Motherboard in the past died on me… However I bought a new ASUS P8P67 Deluxe for my upgrade which died also after flashing a newer BIOS version.. So what? Is ASUS or MSI crap? I believe that all the manufacturers use their customers as testers for their products so to build better revisions.