MSI P55-GD65 LGA 1156 Motherboard Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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MSI P55-GD65 LGA 1156 Motherboard Review - MSI’s latest Intel P55 based board looks to be cut from the same mold as its big brother P55-GC80 motherboard. The GD65 is mean, lean, and ready to rumble. While it does not pack in all the features of the GD80, the GD65 does not act like a $155 motherboard.

MSI continues it P55 HardOCP Gold Editor’s Choice motherboard trend with the P55-GD65. The GD65 is easily one of the best P55 motherboards we have seen this year and if you consider its $155 price tag with Free Shipping, the value really starts to look great. There is just nothing "bad" to say about the GD65. It is great to see MSI finally make it back to producing some of the best enthusiast motherboards in the world.
 
Excellent review as always, gentlemen. I have been eying this board for my much needed upgrade. I really like the value that you are getting with this board, and with the stellar performance (and OC ability) of the i5 and the current budget video card lineup, (5750, please!) this is definitely a great time to upgrade from ye ole' socket 939.

I do a lot of photoshopping and video editing and my current system just can't keep up. I am very exited to pair this board with an i5.

On a side note, are there any LGA1156 cooler reviews in process?
 
If you want a solid cooler for the i5, I'm using a Xigmatek HDT-1283 and its been working awesome. Xigmatek's new LGA 1156 Crossbow bracket is really a great tie-down system and is (I think) less than $10 plus the $20-25 you can get the cooler for, its a great deal and works well, especially when compared to much more expensive alternatives.

As for i5 vs i7, my i5 has been absolutely stellar, and I can't think of a single reason I would need to go to an i7. I think hyperthreading is really pretty useless, and you have plenty of OC headroom on an i5 with a decent cooler. This being the case, spending an extra $80+ for an i7 seems like a lot to pay for not much performance gain.
 
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I read the review on the P55-GD65 and I'm excited about the board and bummed at the same time.

Great review but bad experience with the P55-GD65.

I purchased a new OEM build fron am e-tailer and got a system last week based on the P55-GD65, a core i7-860 and two 2GB sticks of Super Talent DDR3-1600 CL9 RAM.

I kept experiencing random freezes with the system. No blue screens. System could go 5 minutes or 45 minutes and then just freeze. Anything fron installing Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit on it to just opening a web browser, system would just freeze.

Worked with the etailer's support and tried running on a single stick of ram in DIMM1 to no avail (used both ram sticks one at a time). No overclocks of any sort. Ran the RAM at the regular 1333 speeds.

So now it's on a UPS truck heading back to California. Ordered the system in early November and now with the RMA, I'll probably be lucky to have it back before Christmas.

Was upgrading from a Pentium 4 550 based system that hit 5 years old in late October, so was looking forward to a new machine and am very disappointed. So I don't know if it is CPU or mobo related. I suspect a hardware issue and am hoping that it can be idenfied and resolved quickly.

Any thoughts on what could be causing the freezes or something blatantly obvious that I should have checked would be appreciated.
 
I have had the P55 for about three months now and love it. Pushed the oc genie button and had my I7 860 running stable at 4 ghz from the start. It's been rock solid so far and has all the i/o I need. Just wish it could run both pcie slots at 16x but I know that's a limitation of the cpu.
 
...

Just wish it could run both pcie slots at 16x but I know that's a limitation of the cpu.

The bandwidth limit AFAIK is due to the P55 chipset rather than the CPU. I have no idea why Intel decided to limit the bandwidth (probably due to product differentiation) as the P55 platform is great. Will be interesting to see when Intel decides to support SATA 6Gb in their upcoming chipset. Its simply too easy to saturate the PCIe lanes on the P55. Then again, we'll always have the X58 :D
 
I got a P55-GD65 mobo, the same CPU and almost the exact same memory (I was stupid and bought the AMD version). I've not had any freezes, my only problem was that the mobo or perhaps the PSU would make an annoying coil whine noise when Green Power was activated, the CPU usage were below 10% and the hard drive got accessed. I hate coil whine, can't stand it, so I first fixed it by running folder@home, but later I got the idea that perhaps it had something to do with me using AMD memory. Oddly enough, it seems to be the case as the problem went away by manually setting the memory to their manufacturer specified timings (CL 8-8-8) instead of the auto timings (CL 9-9-9).

Fan control is one area I find this board a letdown. My former mobo was an Abit (RIP) board and my main reason for going MSI was that it was the only board reviews mentioned any kind of fan speed control, but where the Abit had variable speed fan control on all headers the MSI only has on the CPU header. The other headers have coarse 25-50-75-100 fixed speed settings in the BIOS but fortunately Speedfan lets me adjust the settings with 5% increments at least.

On the upside I think the audio is better than my last board and while I've not done any testing it seems to have less hiss than my X-Fi too. The X-Fi cheats a bit by muting audio when there's nothing playing, but that's good enough for me so I'm sticking with my bought and payed for X-fi :D

Overall I’m satisfied but I’d rather have a P55 Abit board :)
 
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Does this motherboard use a Foxconn socket?

I have the P55-GD80 and it has a Foxconn Socket, so I would have to guess that this one does too. Should be an issue though- just check your CPU after seating it once and make sure there are clear dimples in all of the pads- as long as you have good contact, you shouldn't have any problems (at least from what I've read about the Foxconn Sockets- I did some research since I bought mine before that whole issue came to light, so I wanted to make sure I was ok. I checked mine and it was making good contact on all pins/pads.)
 
I could be complete wrong on this but personally I think the whole socket issue is just much FUD, else we'd be seeing/hearing A LOT more about it. Think about it, if there were any serious problems due to CPU sockets, I highly doubt we'd be keeping mum about it. I can safely say that most of us here arent exactly a quiet mob :p
 
Ive had this board a little while now. The OC geien was on by default. It actually under clocked my i7 860 to 2.4GHz.
:(
I blamed that on the stock heat sink. When Thermalright came out with the 1156 mounting bracket I lapped my i7, slapped on a TRUE and tried again. The same underclock happened. Been able to manually bump the speed up to 3.4Ghz without any addition voltage and 4.1 Ghz with some extra juice.
 
I was under the impression that the sockets only got burned if you were applying extreme voltage and overclocks with LN2 or other exotic cooling methods- something which is outside the realm of even the [H]ard.
 
Can you explain why the Intel'sP55single harddisk sata II performance is better then the Jmicron ?
Two out of three are a win for the Jmicron, so i am confused :confused:
 
hey there are load line calibration issues with this board - the bios disables it when enabled and vice versa. also it doesn't do a very good job with voltage fluctuations and has been limiting my overclock. you guys may want to take another look at it and monitor the vcore to see what im talking about.

other then that issue i have loved this board but that has seriously limited my oc :(
i run 4ghz btw 24/7 and can bench at 4.2ish
 
Hey again. Just got my GD65 after purchasing on black friday. Am not getting any POST beeps, tried removing ram, no beeps either. Removed from case to make sure there weren't any shorts. Still no beeps. Tried different PSU, GFX card, 1 stick of ram into each slot, etc. Sound defective to you?
 
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Hey again. Just got my GD65 after purchasing on black friday. Am not getting any POST beeps, tried removing ram, no beeps either. Removed from case to make sure there weren't any shorts. Still no beeps. Tried different PSU, GFX card, 1 stick of ram into each slot, etc. Sound defective to you?

That would be my conclusion after trying everything you did. DOA
 
Got my GD65 and love it. Very solid board for the money. Pushed my i5 750 to 4ghz easily and bench at 4.2 no problem. Vdroop was a bit strange on this board. I have posted my OC settings a few times already but thought this would be a good place to put them as well.

ONLY SETTINGS I TOUCHED: BIOS 1.5
20x200 = 4ghz
Vdroop - Low (when set to high the V-droop is a lot and meant I had to feed much more voltage for stability)
CPU V = 1.376 (Actual voltage 1.392 - 1.416, It raises under load which I am not used to) . This passed 5 Linpack Cycles, 3 Vantage runs and 8 hours of Prime 95.
CPUVTT = 1.25
DRAM V = 1.651
C1E = disabled
EIST = disabled
Overspeed protection = disabled
Green Power = disabeled
RAM - 8-8-8-24 1600mhz
 
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hey there are load line calibration issues with this board - the bios disables it when enabled and vice versa. also it doesn't do a very good job with voltage fluctuations and has been limiting my overclock. you guys may want to take another look at it and monitor the vcore to see what im talking about.

other then that issue i have loved this board but that has seriously limited my oc :(
i run 4ghz btw 24/7 and can bench at 4.2ish

What bios version? I am running 1.5 and the only options for Vdroop I have are Low and High. If I run low the board over volts a bit under load which helps stability.
 
Where the hell is Turbo Boost on this board in the bios? I see screen shots of it in the Cell Menu and then I see others with screen shots that look like mine and don't show it in the Cell Menu.


EDIT: I am being told certain options have to be enabled for the Turbo Boost menu option to even be present. Can anyone confirm?
 
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Soo much for mother board of the year. I have had this board for about 4 month. running a i5-750, 1.4 vcore true rev c, memory 1.66 volts 4 ghz 200X20 folding 24-7. 3 days i ago i wanted more speed. 205X20 needed 1.45 vcore. so says cpu-z the setting's in the bios where 1.38 vdroop set to low.. i was using a big 150cfm fan soo my temps where only 72-75c according to real-temp. this morning woke up to the power button flashing. this is the 3rd msi board in as many months. the other 2 where p55-cd53's those died with a i7@190X21 1.4 vcore. all these boards where in a antec 300 with all 5 fans. soo plenty of air over the board to keep it cool. Update -it wasnt the board it was the power supply.
 
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Mine still running strong now with an overclocked i7 860. I had my Vdroop set to high or I had to raise the voltage when set to low. I have two friends both using this board. One has an I5 at 4ghz and the other has an i7 860 at 3.6ghz. Both are still runninng *knock on wood*
 
Soo much for mother board of the year. I have had this board for about 4 month. running a i5-750, 1.4 vcore true rev c, memory 1.66 volts 4 ghz 200X20 folding 24-7. 3 days i ago i wanted more speed. 205X20 needed 1.45 vcore. so says cpu-z the setting's in the bios where 1.38 vdroop set to low.. i was using a big 150cfm fan soo my temps where only 72-75c according to real-temp. this morning woke up to the power button flashing. this is the 3rd msi board in as many months. the other 2 where p55-cd53's those died with a i7@190X21 1.4 vcore. all these boards where in a antec 300 with all 5 fans. soo plenty of air over the board to keep it cool.


So much for running it into the ground 24/7. :rolleyes: I wonder what you people expect sometimes when running something so far out of spec in a 24/78 abuse environment.
 
If you've fried 3 boards in 3 months, it's statistically pretty unlikely that the problem is the motherboard. Maybe your PSU is flaky or your power source is dirty.
 
I should have mentioned mine is a 24/7 box also. No problems. Got mine when the board came out also.
 
Update- im gonna have to eat my words here as it was the power supply. the GD-65 is back to taking everything i can throw at it. now i wanna know why there was enough power to make the power light flash?
 
I just picked up one of these boards off of the forums recently due to it's crossfire support. My P55a UD3 does not do 8x/8x.

Anyways much like the bit-tech review as well as a few others mention the vdroop on this board is obscene. I'm seeing almost a 0.1 difference in vcc between idle and load. To make matters worse loadline has the opposite problem where vcc goes up under load. Both issues appear to be common for this board.

My Gigabyte P55a UD3 is a far better board for 24/7 clocks.
 
I bought this board shortly after this review along with a i7-860. I've been running it 24/7 at 200x21 for 4.2Ghz ever since I've had it and I've never had 1 issue with stability or anything. I keep it cool with a custom water loop using a Swiftech Apogee XT block

3D Mark 11: 7890 Currently the top i7-860 w/GTX 460 in SLi :D

3D Mark Vantage: 35,222 Currently #2 with Vantage
 
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