MSI P67A-GD80 Motherboard REVIEW (LGA1155)

by EvOcarlos

 

Here we have the newly released MSI P67A-GD80 motherboard
It’s aimed at the hardcore gamers and power users and comes with Premium functions

 

Let’s take a look at the motherboard layout and parts and there locations

Here we see the overall look of the motherboard
It has a good colour scheme and nice spacing for gpu's 1-2 or 3 and it comes in an ATX form factor so it will fit in large range of cases




The Cpu area
This area is nice and clean due to the use of the Hi-c CAPs and the Super Ferrite Chokes
The CPU socket is a LGA1155 and MSI have used the Lotes socket
The motherboard itself supports the Intel Sandy Bridge range of processors
There are also some nicely styled heat sinks to cool the DrMOS advanced digital VRM
The GD-80 comes with a 12 power phase setup to give a Higher Level of Over clocking Stability




The Memory area
The P67A-GD80 comes with 4 slots supporting DDR3 1066/1333/1600*/2133*(*OC) and up to 32GB Max
We can also see the use of a 2 power phase DrMOS advanced digital VRM, super Ferrite Chokes, and Solid CAP for powering the memory




The south bridge area
Here again we see the nicely styled heat sinks to cool the p67 chipset
It comes with 6 x sata ports 2 x 6gbs (white) and 4 x 3gbs (black)
A new feature on MSI motherboards is the use of dual BIOS's one main bios and a 2nd BIOS for recovering the 1st bios if it ever fails
Also here we can see usb 2.0 header's and usb 3.0 header's power/reset/power led/hdd led header's




The rear I/O panel
Well what can I say there is so much choice on the rear panel
Ports listed in order from left to right (blue usb ports are usb 3.0)
- 1 x PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard port - 2 x USB 2.0 ports
- 1 x Clear CMOS button
- 1 x Coaxial SPDIF port - 1 x Optical SPDIF port
- 1 x IEEE1394 port - 2 x USB 3.0 ports
- 2 x USB 2.0 ports - 2 x eSATA ports
- 2 x RJ45 LAN Jacks - 4 x USB 3.0 ports
- 1 x 6 in 1 audio jack





Not to forget that MSI have included power/reset and OC genie buttons
Useful for when the motherboard is used on a benching table



MSI have also put a 6pin pci-e plug at the top of the pci-e slot to boost the 12v rail that supplies the gfx cards



Right, so now we have seen how the MSI P67A-GD80 looks let’s move on to the BIOS and testing

 

CLICK BIOS
The BIOS on the MSI P67A-GD80 features the new style click BIOS.
Having the use of a mouse in the bios is great. It is just like a mini operating system for the motherboard. The look of the click BIOS is pleasing.
Here you can see the different pages within the BIOS.
There are lots of new features included within this new BIOS although many of the same features from older BIOS styles can still be found.


Within the Utilities menu there are applications for Memory testing/Live update/HDD Backup and boot screen image changing. It even has a Games menu but requires the driver DVD for the games to run.

I’ve found the click BIOS to be just as functional as the old BIOS's but far easier to use and when combined with this CPU/Chipset; it works very well.
It also make's over clocking much easier

**During the use of the click BIOS I did however run in to some problems.
While testing this motherboard, I installed 2 x 2 GB sticks of RAM and set them to run at 2133MHz. Whilst this was fine for one 2GB stick, it failed to POST with the second stick in and went into OC recover mode. After three power on/off cycles, the motherboard completed POST and went straight into the BIOS recovery mode where it flashed the 2nd BIOS to the 1st BIOS.
This was fine as the motherboard is designed to be self recovering the problem lies in the 2nd BIOS.
Once it was flashed to the 1st BIOS chip; while trying to modify settings in the click BIOS and then saving to exit, the BIOS would lock up solid and require the power/reset button to be pressed thus not saving any settings.

After some further investigation it appears that with this motherboard being new both bios chips were flashed with the .AOE bios an early release bios
I have now updated the BIOS to the .AO0 BIOS and found it to be fully functional again.
My only worry is that if this issue occurs again then 2nd bios still has the .AOE BIOS stored on it so in the event of first BIOS failure it would get reflashed with the older .AOE BIOS.
I’m hoping to find a way to flash the second BIOS with the .AO0 BIOS to prevent further problems.
I’m sure this problem will also be restricted to this motherboard with it being an early sample and all newer P67A-GD80's come with updated BIOS

SUPPLYED SOFTWARE
The software DVD supplied with the P67A-GD80 is full of useful programs and drivers for the motherboard.
Driver Section


Utility Section


By far my favourite part of the software is the all new MSI Control Center II
It combines most of the changable settings and system information whilst you're in Windows. It is also a very easy way to overclock and change voltages without requiring a reboot to fiddle with them in the BIOS.


Other included software applicatons are shown HERE

Now to move on to the fun stuff Testing and Overclocking...

 

Right after spending some time playing with the P67A-GD80 i found it to be very easy to use and so simple to overclock.

I have ran a few benchmarks to show the Stock / OC genie / User OC settings and the performance output with each step of settings with various benchmarks

The setup testbed consists of
Intel I7 2600k
MSI P67A-GD80
MSI N480GTX
Mushkin Callisto 60GB SSD
Mushkin Ridgeback 4GB (998826)
Antec TruePower Quattro 1200W

The benchmarks used were
3Dmark06
3Dmark Vantage
3Dmark 11
Wprime
Super PI 1mb


Stock Settings (BIOS defaults loaded)


Wprime and Super PI


3DMARK06


3DMARK VANTAGE


3DMARK 11


OC Genie settings
As with most MSI motherboards the GD80 has the OC genie button for a 1 second overclock
With these runs of the benchmarks all that was done is to depress the OC genie button and power on



Wprime and Super PI


3DMARK06


3DMARK VANTAGE


3DMARK 11


Manual Overclocking
heres what can be done with just a few simple changes in the Click bios
By changing the CPU multiplier to 50x and adjusting the CPU core voltage to 1.4v then setting the memory to XMP 1866
The setup was stable to run most of the following benchmarks apart from 3Dmark 11 which needed more voltage to the CPU to get past the GT4 test at this point I also added a slight Overclock to the GPU
for the manual overclocking an after market CPU cooler was used (cooler master Hyper TX3)



Wprime and Super PI


3DMARK06


3DMARK VANTAGE


3DMARK 11