MSI P67A-GD55 – Design

The MSI P67A-GD55 is a fairly small-scale looking motherboard. We like the blueish and blackness colour scheme, but given its limited feature set, the board looks pretty arid compared to the others in our roundup.

Although the lath's cooling setup looks puny, it'south actually probably more than realistic in terms of what is really required by the VRM and P67 chip. You'd await this to provide extra elbow room than the contest, just MSI's entry still feels a bit cramped.

The CPU socket is very close to the DIMM slots which are showtime virtually 4cm from the border of the board. That said, this has likely been done to follow Intel'southward design specifications for the motherboard. All in all, we don't have any major gripes about the layout.

There are several buttons in the bottom correct corner of the board to ability up or reset the system and employ the OC Genie Two feature. Next to them is the only onboard USB two.0 header which supports the MSI Super Charger feature. Every bit seen on other P67 motherboards in our roundup, Super Charger provides extra power to quickly charge devices such as smart phones. MSI does not specific how much more power these ports supply, just that it provides more power than a standard USB 2.0 connector.

Another interesting feature is the Multimeter points located in the top right corner of the board. This feature lets you keep track of motherboard voltages using a Multimeter and would undoubtedly be handy for hardcore overclockers.

The I/O panel has a reasonable corporeality of connectivity, including a PS/2 port, two USB 3.0 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, LAN port, FireWire port, optical Southward/PDIF, coaxial South/PDIF and half-dozen audio jacks. While information technology may exist less I/O than the other boards in our review, it does provide the essentials with eSATA maybe beingness the but exception.