Your Thoughts On This P55 Board

[Carlosinfl]

So I was wondering if you guys had any comments about this motherboard for a new system I wanted to build. I don't overclock at all or care about the ease of overclocking a system but all around it looks like a nice mainboard. Only things I can see that I don't like are:

- dual legacy PS2 connections for keyboard / mouse
- single NIC
- only 4 DIMM's for RAM (I prefer 6)

 

[E4g1e]

So I was wondering if you guys had any comments about this motherboard for a new system I wanted to build. I don't overclock at all or care about the ease of overclocking a system but all around it looks like a nice mainboard. Only things I can see that I don't like are:

- dual legacy PS2 connections for keyboard / mouse
- single NIC
- only 4 DIMM's for RAM (I prefer 6)

Actually, you would need to go the LGA 1366 (i7-9xx) / X58 route if you want six DIMM slots. That MSI motherboard is a Socket LGA 1156 mobo, which is designed for the i7-8xx as well as the i5 and i3 CPUs. All Socket LGA 1156 CPUs have only dual-channel memory controllers and are limited to eight ranks total. This means that if an LGA 1156 mobo has six DIMM slots, you cannot fill all six of them with double-ranked DIMMs - in fact, only two of the six DIMM slots may be filled with double-ranked DIMMs while the other DIMM slots must be filled only with single-ranked DIMMs. Or, if all of the modules in your possession are double-ranked, you may fill only four of the six slots (the other two slots must be left empty, in this case). And the current market of 2GB DIMMS is that most of them are still double-ranked; few if any single-ranked 2GB DIMMs are available.

 

[Carlosinfl]

Good info about why I didn't find any with 6 DIMM's but I am still interested in the over all thoughts about this motherboard.