Gadgetory

today I'm going to be having a look at a refresh motherboard from MSI so this is the p55 a g55 it's going to be very similar to their previous p55 boards except for a couple of things first of all you've got support for SATA 6 gigabits per second and second of all you've got support for USB 3 this also features their military class concept which means you've got top quality components including IC chokes and solid caps so IC chokes MSI cleans run it up to 20 degrees lower than regular chokes and they're solid caps they claim has a minimum of a 10-year lifetime so gives you a long lifetime low-temperature which we've covered already as well as high stability and better overclocking let's get this board opened right up and have a look at what we find inside we've got a drivers and utilities DVD we've got a user's guide for their hard drive backup software we've got a quick installation guide their users guide for MSI winkie software control center so this is their software for system monitoring overclocking and power saving gives you a quick guide on how to use it full color and everything look at that I love seeing full color manuals and pamphlets it's just it's that those extra little touches here's their full user guide which is in a number of languages English Deutsche Bahn say I don't know how to pronounce Russian okay for the back which clearly labels your USB 3.0 ports 0.01 SATA cable molex to SATA power adapter and an IDE cable that isn't odd-odd loads of accessories I would have expected to see maybe like four SATA cables and then no molex to SATA power adapter and no IDE cable that might have made a little bit more sense I've actually talked to a Maasai about that and they're looking at improving their there their bundles or a future motherboards so yeah how about that okay let's have a look at the board itself the board itself is awesome looking okay really hold on I should go back to this kind of thing realistically if you're anything like me look at this you've got a of SATA cables lying around it doesn't really matter here that I can find more just in this room mom what do we got in here yep video cards we got some video cards got some SSDs are you know two more SATA cables that was hard anyway yeah SATA cables are not a big deal but if you if it includes them then great alright so let's have a look at the board layout first of all you got your eight pin power connector and it's ideal location up on the top left-hand edge of the board you've got nice little heatsink on your voltage regulators down here you've got active phase between power savings so what this does is it determines how many cpu how many phases of the power delivery system the CP is actually look using and when the CPU is under heavier load it will enable more of them for more stable power and when the CPU is under light load it'll actually disable some for some power savings so that's pretty cool feature here's your LGA 1156 socket this is a load socket so you can be assured that it will make good contact with the pins between the motherboard and the pads on the bottom of the CPU next we have dual channel ddr3 memory support up to 16 gigs presumably you've got a 24 pin power connector on the right-hand edge of the board exactly where it belongs now in terms of things that you can plug into this board we've got 6 SATA 2 and these are actually in a fairly good layout I saw these ones here and I kind of went that might be bad but it's ok because even if you've got a dual slot graphics card here it's only gonna cover up to about here which is where they're using the right angle connectors and if you need to use these you definitely can even with a card installed here and a card installed there so that should be fine and then once again they've got the 2 SATA 6 gigabits per second ports also coming right out of the board and that shouldn't be a problem either because the second dual slaw graphics card would go here and it would be well out of the way of that as well here's your IDE port that's a right angle port because that would be in the way of a topic of a bottom graphics card and then what else do we have on here we've got a couple of OC switches we've got their clear CMOS jumper then we have a power switch which is great if you're benching this board on an open test bench we've got 2 front USB headers we've got our panel connectors so that's for your power switch LEDs all that good stuff and then we've also got a floppy connector just in case you still need one of those the audio connector is down at the very bottom left of the board near the audio chipset which is right here it's a real tech chipset now in terms of expansion this is one of the things I really like about the way MSI engineers their boards instead of leaving a spot here like many other manufacturers do and installing only six can and only installing only six expansion slots on their motherboards MSI actually puts the extra work into it does the routing that's necessary to make sure that they can put a slot right at the top and that means that you can install up to seven expansion cards because really nobody installs seven expansion cards very few people but if you're installing two dual slot graphics cards that leaves you with one two three if you only have six that leaves you with only two and lots of people want to install three expansion cards besides their graphics versus two so there you go that is why I'm such a big fan of the way MSI does their boards with seven expansion slots versus only six on many of their competitors here's the p55 chipset that is running this particular board and then let's move around to the backward we will see all of our input and output on the back panel so we have optical audio out in a location that I've never seen it before but I think the reason they've done this is it leaves way more room for tons of USB ports we have a ps2 combo port 8 USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports one Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio out thank you for checking out my unboxing of the p55 a g55 motherboard from msi