MSI P55-GD65 - Mid-Range P55 for the Masses
by Gary Key on October 10, 2009 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Gaming-
FarCry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. We set the performance feature set to Very High, graphics to High, and enable DX10 with AA set to 2x. The in-game benchmark tool is utilized with the Ranch Small level and we report an average of three test runs.
FarCry 2 CrossFireX
Left 4 Dead
This game is a blast and addictive to boot - provided you like killing hundreds of zombies while trying to take care of your teammates and sustaining high blood pressure rates. We enable all options, set AA to 2x and AF to 8x, and play back a custom demo of a game session from the Runway Finale chapter within the Dead Air campaign.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
We are big fans of the Warhammer franchise, especially Dawn of War II. One of the latest RTS games in our library is also one of the more demanding titles on both the CPU and GPU. We crank all options to High, enable AA, and then run the built-in performance benchmark for our result.
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.
While not a true flight simulation or even serious air combat game, it is a lot of fun and looks visually stunning on a 30” monitor with all options turned up. In our case, we set all options to high, enable 2xAA and DX10, and then use FRAPS to time a custom demo sequence. We run three loops of the benchmark and average our scores for the results.
Crysis Warhead
We utilize the Ambush level for our game test. We set the resolution to 1680x1050 with 2xAA, DX10, and 64-bit enabled.
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MadMan007 - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
er *video performance test. Whatever, not the place I'd expect to read about motherboard features or stuff that I'd epect to find in, ya know, regular motherboard reviews.vlado08 - Sunday, October 11, 2009 - link
Gary, give us the POST time ot the boards. Not the OS load time but the POST time. And Sata to be in AHCI mode.Sunburn74 - Saturday, October 10, 2009 - link
This really was a great review. You tell the end user pretty much everything he needs to know. I love how you tested S3 resume. Its very frustrating to buy a board said to have great overclocking and find that you can only overclock 300mhz before S3 sleep goes haywire. If this board can be pushed to 190blck before S3 goes awry that is amazingly good. Gigabyte boards give you about 600mhz of head room before they start failing in that regard. I don't know about you, but I don't like having to to weigh the value of keeping a 4ghz processor vs being able to have a computer that sleeps.Also what gives with the floppy and the ide ports? Who still uses floppies?
Great review. I'll definitely keep this board in sight for when I build my p55 rig.
lopri - Sunday, October 11, 2009 - link
Gary now writes practically critic-proof reviews.Zaitsev - Saturday, October 10, 2009 - link
Who still uses floppies? I still use floppies. I was pretty perturbed when I realized my P55 Asus board didn't have floppy support. Call me old school, but its compatible and works when you need sata drivers.MadMan007 - Sunday, October 11, 2009 - link
Well I can see how floppy is deprecated unless you need drivers for XP (old now, although WHS needs a floppy for F6 drivers) or an alternative OS (not sure about the latter) but I'm with you on IDE. If they're going to have a JMicron controller on the board might as well include the IDE connector, it probably adds almost nothing more to the cost.There are particular instances where having an IDE optical drive is beneficial. I set up my SATA drives as AHCI and some bootable ISOs do not play well with AHCI (or RAID) setting. I do have a SATA optical but having an IDE optical for booting such ISOs without having to mess around in the BIOS is nice and it guarantees compatability. I guess you could use a SATA optical on the JMicron set to IDE but I had the IDE drive so...
I think it's funny that someone would 'look down on' a board for having an IDE connector..wtf? It's not hurting anything being there, just ignore it.
Makaveli - Sunday, October 11, 2009 - link
Who still uses Floopies I do!! I won't do a bios flash on my motherboard from windows or flashing a videocard bios!!!However there are these really great devices called USB thumb drives which you can make bootable and guess what goodbye floppy!!
The only valid reason to keep using them is if your board doesn't allow booting from USB!
Welcome to 2009!
stmok - Sunday, October 11, 2009 - link
Floppy disk for SATA drivers?Can't you slipstream them in a customised Windows install CD via nLite/vLite? (I've only seen it done to a WinXP install CD.)
MadMan007 - Sunday, October 11, 2009 - link
Good luck running nLite or vLite without an OS installed! ;) That's what second computers are for but still...tony montana - Saturday, October 10, 2009 - link
I old school too. The same on IDE. why I have to spend some bucks on a new DVD burner for 4 or 5 burns a year?This board has at least these ports at the right place for me, not on the bottom like others.
thanks for review, is one of the two mobos I have in mind to purchase and I have seen some tips I haven´t see in others reviews