Layout

The MSI P55-GD80 presents itself on a black PCB with blue and black expansion slots as well as a blue and black passive heatpipe covering northbridge, southbridge and current converters. The design in black, blue and black looks very nice and leaves a lasting optical impression. Like this the MSI P55-GD80 is also a very nice product to look at. The only issue is that when you install a graphics card into PCIe slot two or three you wont be able to use all the different overclocking buttons and displays.

MSI provided the P55-GD80 with a ten phase power design whereas which seems quite boring compared to other manufacturers 16 or 24 phases but it definitely is enough. MSI also uses All-Solid-Capacitors which have an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of 50'000 hours.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the MSI P55-GD80. Officially supported are DDR3-2133(O.C)/2000(O.C)/1800/1600/1333/1066 with up to 16 GByte capacity.

North-and Southbridge as well as current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. Unfortunately the cooling blocks around the CPU socket are a quite big which can cause problems when you want to install very big aircoolers. MSI provides overclockers with a special: close to the DIMM-slots you'll find measuring point to read out the exact voltage with a multimeter.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 8 - SiSoft Sandra 1
Page 2 - Specifications / Delivery	Page 9 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 3 - Layout	Page 10 - Super Pi / wPrime
Page 4 - Connectors and I/O	Page 11 - Games
Page 5 - BIOS	Page 12 - Overclocking
Page 6 - Test setup	Page 13 - Conclusion
Page 7 - Futuremark

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