MSI Big Bang Trinergy review

Right, there we have the MSI P55 GHD80- Trinergy. That's a smoking hot feature rich motherboard IMHO. Everything on this motherboard seems to be focused at performance, with some very exquisite overclock features and slick design. The two tone (black/blue) design appeals to me very much.

We received the final retail sample and as such it comes packed with a nice phat product bundle. Among the gear inside the kit you'll find the following:

• Big bang Trinergy Motherboard
• Quantum Wave audio card
• OC Dashboard
• MSI Driver/Utility CD
• SATA cables
• SATA power cable
• USB Bracket
• IDE cable
• V-Check cables
• CrossfireX bridges
• SLI bridges
• Back IO shield
• Manual

To complement the motherboard the Big Bang Trinergy comes bundled with a PCIe x1 Quantum Wave audio card that supports THX TruStudio PC and what we like very much, Creative EAX Advanced HD 5.0 The card is seated into the top x1 PCIe slot.

Now I dissected it for you as .. well I was curious if anything remotely Creative Labs was to be found on this board. And the answer to that is nope -- it's all Realtek.

The Quantum Wave audio card comes with 7.1 channel audio output (analog) but also coaxial and optical TOSLINKs are present. A very nicely added bonus alright. Despite looks of a dedicated soundcard, it's merely an application layer addon -- main sound is still handled by the motherboards integrated Realtek ALC889 -- yet enhanced by Creative and THX.

 

Also you will spot a OC Dashboard device that enables users to do some quick, on-the-fly overclocking but also functions as Debug PORT during boot up. You guys know the POST LEDs with error codes right ? Well, during the POST and boot sequence this device will display the status codes.

Within windows however, the device allows for real-time statistics but also overclocking. You can tweak voltages on all primary parts and increase the base clock. We'll demonstrate this with the help of a video later on. It's a bit of a gadget granted -- but a very nice one.

 

So here we have the motherboard itself, it's an impressive and daunting looking motherboard alright. Pricing for this really high-end motherboard will be high-end as well, expect 250~300 USD. Some of the more notable features are:

• 4x DDR3-2133OC
• 2x GB LAN
• 3x PCI-E16
• 8x SATA
• 2x eSATA / USB combo ports
• 8xUSB
• S/PDIF
• DrMOS
• OC Genie
• V-Kit
• APS
• SuperPipe Cooling
• NF200 bridge chip
• OC Dashboard
• Quantum Wave SoundCard

From left to right that's a PS2 keyboard and mouse connector. Then I count a total of eight USB 2.0 ports, 1x firewire, 2x eSATA / USB combo ports, 2x Gigabit Ethernet.  The weird looking connector is a port for the OC Dashboard external controller (D-LED2 panel connector).

When we flip the board around we stumble into the processor area. We spot the 8-pin CPU power header to the right; we see solid core chokes and obviously the all new Socket 1156 for Lynnfield based processors. The board incorporates the latest durable components like solid capacitor ferrite core chokes, quality components. That not only ensures stability -- but also reliability and extended lifespan.

Also notice that every part on this motherboard that can create heat is being cooled by a passive cooler. See that white 3-pin fan header just above the DrMOS logo ?

So next to it you'll spot a display LED. Once the board is powered on it will actually display the active number of power phases used. It's called the APS (Active Phase Switching) LED.

The Trinergy comes with APS, which is short for Active Phase Switching. Much like say DES on the Gigabyte motherboards, it can en/dis-able power phases depending on load. And that means better power saving. The GD80 has a 14-phase Dr.MOS PWM design with 8 phases alone for the processor; which is more than enough for overclocking and tweaking, 2 for VTT, 2 for memory and 2 for the P55 PCH (platform controller hub). Only the best selection in components is spotted here.

Once we flip the board around once more we again stumble into the DIMM slots, DDR3 of course. There is DIMM support for 1GB/ 2GB/ 4GB DRAM sizes -- dual-channel.

Recently MSI introduced their new V-Kit concept allowing Voltage monitoring and manipulation.. It was already to be found at some of their their GTX260 Lightning series graphics cards, but it is extended towards the high-end motherboards as well. MSI creates voltage measuring points for various voltages used by the motherboards.

All the way to the left you can see DIP-switches, with the dip-switch next to the Voltage control points, you can actually increase the voltage at hardware level breaking the BIOS limits with another 0.2 Volts.

Voltage monitoring -- Here's the idea, you stick a wire onto a positive and ground pin and that allows you to check out voltages with a multimeter.

MSI's V-Kit will not be exclusive for the most expensive models but according to the source, MSI will equip all of its P55 motherboards with this V-Kit. Above you can see how that works, we are tapping the CPU rails here by the way.

Overall board design is just great by the way. Everything is positioned really well. Let's move onward to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors.

The P55-GD80 Trinergy features six right-angle SATA II (3Gb/s) ports which are supplied by the P55 chipset and they support AHCI and RAID 0/1/5/10. In addition to the regular six SATA II ports, colored in blue we see another four additional SATA ports, powered by two JMicron JMB322 controllers. These they support RAID 0/1 and JBOD.

Then another JMicron JMB363 controller brings the support for the IDE port and two eSATA/USB combo port on the I/O panel. If you count SATA and PATA .. that's a grand total of fourteen storage devices ! The Trinergy is chucked with gadgets and features for sure.

We flip the board around again 90 degrees and stumble into low-level connectivity. Spot front panel headers, three more USB headers, a Firewire header and audio connectors. You just can't deny that this is going to be a very complete motherboard alright. But let's zoom in a little to the lower right segment of the photo.

We see GreenPower, Reset and Power on-board "touch" buttons. It might look like MSI forget to install something there but in fact these are Easy Button II switches -- electromagnetic touch button for Reset/Power/GreenPower (LED light switch), there is no "physical" button, you just touch PCB directly, and as mystical as that is and sounds it actually works. It's one of these things that separates the motherboard from the competition.

To the left we stumble into another two buttons -- OC Genie, and a CLR CMOS button. That OC Genie button is hot stuff as we'll show you in a separate chapter. The button leads to core logic located in-between the PCIe slots.

This is the OC Genie IC, embedded into the motherboard. The OC Genie is an overclocker ASIC. It's primary function is to find an optimal overclocking settings for your configuration in a very short timeframe. Again we'll handle this feature in a separate chapter.

Also, it's good to see that the entire motherboard will be cooled passively. MSI applies their SuperPipe cooling that we know from the GD65, but this time it has a larger heatsink that has to cover the 8+2-phase VRM. MSI uses a really thick 8mm heatpipe for the great cooling efficiency.

Check it out, two x1 PCIe slots, three physical x16 PCIe graphics slots (rev 2.0), Now since typically the chipset/cpu combo only allows for x16 PCIe lanes, MSI added a NF200 bridge chip on the motherboard. The NF200 chip adds more PCI Express lanes to the motherboard so full 16x bandwidth can be supplied to the available PCI Express slots. This will add an additional 16 PCI-E lanes to the motherboard allowing you to go for SLI (2-way / 3-way) -- With 32 lanes, Trinergy is able to support for three-way SLI or CrossFire configuration at a per-lane performance of x16, x8, x8.

Crossfire obviously will work with three cards as well, no questions asked there. On the motherboard we'll spot chips from VIA VT6315N, a FireWire/IEEE 1394a controller that runs on the PCI-Express bus and we spot the Realtek RTL8111DL for Gigabit LAN and a Realtek ALC 889A 8-channel HD controller. Yeah, that's a pretty looking hardcore overclocking raving piece of machinery alright.

The OC Genie

Now I promised to talk you through that OC Genie button / functionality for a minute, I am just really impressed with it. Who would use the OC genie? Well, some of you guys do not have the skills or time to overclock your PC. If this applies to you, then this might be the best thing since the invention of sliced bread really (okay that's an overstatement)

So I feel that typically most automated overclock functions paired with motherboards are software based and work a little so-so. Often the overclocks are too small to really notice. And that's just not the case with OC Genie, a one-touch automatic overclocking solution.

Here's the idea: when you powered down your PC, you can you push the button above (lights up in blue) which activates OC Genie (a little chip on the motherboard). This chip will automatically determine and implement an optimal overclock setting. It'll take merely 15 seconds or something and the end result is quite a spiffy overclock.

Take a look at the screenshots below, we have the 2.9 GHz Core i7 870 installed here. We press the OC Genie button which then lights up blue, we power on the PC, wait like 15 seconds and voilla, the system starts to POST.

You'll notice our PC all of the sudden is clocked at 4 GHz (!), and here's the shocker -- it's really a stable overclock. Another good thing is that the OC will be saved automatically, thus the next time you power up your PC the overclock is still applied (until you release the OC Button) . To go back to default / initial conditions, just press the OC Genie button once more (release) and restart the PC.

This is a fool-proof solution offering quite a nice overclock. Check out the stress test with Prime95 session below.

One thing though, overclocking means increased voltages, multipliers and so on .. as the screenshot above already shows, you need to have decent airflow in the chassis, but of course the CPU cooler needs to be a serious one, we used the new Noctua NH-D14 heatpipe based cooler.

Manual overclocking
Of course you can bypass the OC Genie and check do a manual BIOS overclock. So let's try that out. We fire of a much higher base clock to that multiplier of 22.

As such we were able to overclock the Core i7 870 processor to 4.1 GHz. Here's what we did:

• Disable Turbo mode
• Set maximum processor multiplier
• Increase processor voltage a little bit to 1.42v
• Lower QPI ratio (as close as possible to 4800).
• Lower memory multiplier to maximum stable memory frequency
• Increase CPU base frequency

At 4000 MHz on the air cooler we easily booted into windows. We settled at 22x187.5 @ 1.42 Volts. The end result was a stable 4125 MHz.

Overclocking itself, it is a pretty easy thing to achieve with this processor. Mind you that overclocking will draw a lot of power from your system. We'll show you.

Power Consumption and temperatures

The new Lynnfield based processors have gotten a bit of a redesign and as such they are very energy friendly processors, well --  as long as you do not overclock them.

A processor like the Core i7 870 on average has more performance than a core i7 920 yet consumes only 95 Watt, and that is with all cores stressed. Next to that, clever power management allows the internal voltages and processors multiplier to drop, core independent.

The new Core i7 870 processor has a TDP of 95W, coming from 130 for the Bloomfield Core i7 series that's quite an improvement and it shows this during our measurements:

Power Consumption	idle	100% CPU load
MSI P55 Trinergy | 870	100	153
Intel DP55KG | 870	86	161
ECS P55H-A |870	115	170
ASUS P7P55D Deluxe | 870	100	171
Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 870	92	178
ASUS Maximus Gene III | 870	103	179
eVGA P55 Classified | 870	111	182

As you can see, these are very respectable numbers-- in fact under load the MSI board was the most power efficient. Mind you that this was done with a P55 motherboard, an SSD, optical drive, 8GB memory and Radeon HD 5870 graphics card.

For the best power consumption make sure you have BIOS features like EIST and CE1 enabled and within Windows set your performance mode to balanced (allows the processor to clock down).

Temperatures are very good as well. With an average air cooler you can expect temps like these:

Temperatures	idle	100% CPU load
Core i5 750 (2,66 MHz) 133x20,	39	52
Core i7 860 (2,80 MHz) 133x21	38	52
Core i7 870 (2,93 MHz) 133x22	38	53

This above example was done with a Thermalright MUX 120 air based cooler. Of course results will vary with different mother boards and cooling solutions. But as baseline the temperatures definitely are promising, especially with overclocking in mind.

100% CPU load is 4 cores 100% stressed with Prime 95, voltages are left at default, processor Turbo mode is enabled. Overclocked temps of course will differ, but we'll show you that in a split-second.

 

Overclocking and power consumption

Okay power consumption versus overclocking -- check this out:

Power Consumption	idle	100% CPU load
MSI P55 Trinergy	100	153
MSI P55 Trinergy OC Genie (4 GHz)	138	272

What a lot of you do not realize that overclocking a processor can consume heaps of power. We put this to the test by monitoring power consumption with the processor in its default setting and then compare to an overclocked 4 GHz configuration.  The results are astonishing, when we stress the 4 (8 threaded) CPU cores 100% at default (Turbo on) we peak to only 153 Watt for the default clocked Core i7 870. But once we overclock towards 4 GHz ... the power draw all of the sudden is 272 Watt (!) once we stress all CPU cores 100%, so an additional 1200 MHz of power is costing us an additional 119 Watt (!) and we are not even using the GPU for gaming just yet.

Stuff to think about before you start to overclock as the color green turns really red.

CPU-Z screenshots

As you can see, for this test we use the Core i7 870 -- We spot that hyper-threading is enabled .. 8 threads are available to us. And yes we have OC Genie enabled and the system thus is overclocked at 4 GHz.

Hmmm yes! Lynnfield indeed is Nehalem based, the caches.

Motherboard, BIOS and revision information. We used the latest supplied (A7580IMS.111)

For our regular baseline test we apply standard JEDEC timings 9:9:9:24 T1 at default tests at 1333 MHz. Above is what OC Genie configured automatically.

As you can see, the  OC Genie tried to stay very close to that XMP profile embedded in the EPP (profile cache) of the memory.

Continued to   MSI Big Bang Trinergy review Part.2