I’d like to thank MSI for giving me the chance to test this motherboard.
The Board
When designing this board, MSI seems to have thought of everything. It has all the advanced options and components essential to extreme overclockers, but incorporates several features that make achieving a respectable performance increase easy for the absolute beginner, which I’ll discuss later.
The packaging for the P55-GD80 is not surprising. The box is nearly identical to that of several MSI boards I’ve received in the past.
Inside we find an almost overwhelming selection of accessories: User Manual, OC Genie guide, Quick Installation guide, HDD Backup guide, poster-size quick guide, Winki guide, driver disc, 3x SLI bridges, 1x Crossfire bridge, drive cables (SATA, e-SATA, PATA), IO Shield, 4x voltage read point connectors, and every quick connector you could want.
The board has an attractive blue/black color scheme, and a nice clean layout. Everything is labeled for easy identification so there’s no guessing or manual referencing needed. The socket area may be a little more difficult to insulate for subzero cooling, but nothing too hard to handle. I would list all of the cool board features, but I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Here we see the heatpipe layout for the board is purely cosmetic. Where some manufacturers have left an empty space where the northbridge used to be, or used the space for other components (Asus has moved the first PCI-E 2.0 slot up), MSI has chosen to keep the traditional look. While I always prefer function over form, I can’t argue with the fact that it does, in fact, look nice.
On this corner of the board, we see a few standard features, as well as some new ones. While built in power, reset, and clear cmos buttons are becoming more and more common standard options these days, especially on high end boards, MSI has taken it a step further. The ‘buttons’ have been replaced with MSI’s Easy Button 2 feature, which consists of touch-sensitive keys for easier operation. Initially, I wasn’t expecting to be very impressed with this feature, but it has actually been very useful. Honestly though, it’s one of those things you have to experience to fully appreciate. It’s more fun than necessary, but I now wish every motherboard came with this feature. The only downside is these buttons are much easier to touch accidentally. The only switch MSI did not incorporate into the Easy Button 2 panel is the clear cmos button, for obvious reasons. In fact, they’ve made that button slightly harder to accidentally press by slightly recessing it into the button housing.
This corner also features the OC Genie button, which activates MSI’s OC Genie auto-overclocking function. Also, to be used either in combination with OC Genie or independently, are the Direct OC buttons, which allow bclk adjustment up or down (hence, the – and + buttons), eliminating the need for overclocking software such as setfsb. I’ll discuss both of these features more later on.
There is also a debug LED, something that is essential to casual and extreme overclocking alike, and a feature I’d also like to see included on all motherboards. For those that don’t know, this provides codes for easy troubleshooting.
MSI has also been kind enough to include voltage read points for CPU, VTT, DDR, and PCH, so no soldering is needed to find these exact voltages. Four connectors are included for usage with meter probes. To the left of this panel we have the V Switch, which allows a higher maximum for each corresponding voltage value. I’ll list each of the resulting maximum voltages when I discuss the BIOS settings. They read points work great, but the location makes them a little difficult to access depending on how the 24-pin connector is routed from the power supply. As you’ll see in some photos below mine comes from directly beneath the board, and right over the v-check points.
Here are photos of the testing setup used for this review.
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I hope mine will have LOTES 
Originally Posted by Massman
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