MSI P55-GD65 Motherboard

The motherboard is a full ATX board with dimensions of (30.5cm x 24.4cm). Solid capacitors play a primary role on the board which covers everything for longer life operation and better overclocking capability.

There is no north bridge onboard , so this leaves the heatsink only, covering the Mosfets, leaving a lot of uncluttered space.

The Intel Socket 1156 has quite a unique closet socket, using which it can secure Core i5 CPUs firmly, though a 1366 heatsink retention bracket will not secure the four holes around the socket because the 1156 socket has smaller dimensions.

The P55 motherboard does have Dual Channel DIMMs supporting DDR3 from 1066 up to 2133MHz (OC). Next to the ATX 24PIN power connector is the Voltage Checkpoint, which is used to measure the current CPU/ CPU_VTT/ DDR/ PCH Voltage using voltmeter.
Onboard SATA is controlled by the Intel P55 chipset along with the 6xUSB headers and the IDE connecter is by JMicron JMB363.

The motherboard sports 2x PCIe x1 slot, 1x PCIe X4 slot, 2x PCI slot and 2x PCIe x16 slot, and if the user intends to use both of the slots for Crossfire use, the first slot will switch to x8 speed and the second slot will switch to x8 speed too.

The rear panel holds (from left to right), keyboard and mouse PS2 ports, two SPDIF optical and coaxial ports, a Firewire port, 7 USB ports, eSATA, 2 RJ45 ports, and 6 Audio jacks.

The onboard network controller is courtesy of the Realtek RTL8111DL chipset, supporting gigabit networking. Audio onboard is by Realtek ALC889 chipset supporting true blu-ray audio.

Taking a closer look at the small buttons under the last PCI slot, we see the OC Genie button which should be pressed when the PC is shutdown, so that when the PC is turned on, the motherboard will automatically detects optimal values to overclock the system.

Next to it is the power button and, labeled – and +, which are used to increase the FSB speed while the system is running by increments of 1 MHz.