MSI P55A-GD65 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The Intel P55 chipset is a single-chip solution. The basic features provided by this chipset include six SATA-300 ports (RAID support is optional), no support for parallel ATA (PATA) ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports supporting port disable, an embedded Gigabit Ethernet MAC (Medium Access Control), and eight x1 PCI Express lanes. As explained, this motherboard has a PLX PEX8608 chip that adds another eight  x1 PCI Express lanes.

MSI P55-GD65 provides all the six SATA-300 ports with support for Intel Matrix Storage, which provides RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 (these ports are black). A seventh SATA-300 port (blue) is available, controlled by a JMicron JMB363 chip, which also controls the eSATA-300 port available on the rear panel. This eSATA port is shared with a USB 2.0 port. This motherboard also has two white SATA-600 ports (a.k.a. SATA 6 G), controlled by a Marvell 88SE9128 chip that provides support for RAID 0 and 1.

Even though the chipset doesn’t support parallel ATA (PATA, a.k.a. IDE) ports, this motherboard has one ATA-133 port, controlled by the same JMicron JMB363 chip. This port and the six ports controller by the chipset are placed on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. The other SATA ports are placed where expansion cards won’t block them either.

Figure
4: ATA-133 port and SATA ports

No floppy disk drive controller is present.

From the 14 USB 2.0 ports supported by the chipset, the MSI P55A-GD65 offers 12 of them, six soldered on the rear panel and six available through three motherboard headers.

One of the highlights of this motherboard is the presence of two USB 3.0 ports, controlled by a NEC μPD720200 chip. These ports are available on the rear panel of the product and painted blue (USB 2.0 ports are black).

Additionally, the MSI P55A-GD65 comes with a FireWire (IEEE 1394) controller, providing two FireWire ports, one soldered on the rear panel and one available through a header. The motherboard doesn’t come with an I/O bracket for you to use the second FireWire port. So if you decide to buy this motherboard, it is a good idea to buy a case with four USB ports and one FireWire port, so you can use all available ports.

Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC889 codec (the same used on the original GD65, on the GD80, and on the GD85), which provides professional-grade audio to this motherboard, with eight channels, 24-bit resolution, a sampling rate of up to 192 kHz for both inputs and outputs, 104 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, and 108 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the outputs. With a high signal-to-noise ratio like this you can work professionally, converting, mixing, and editing audio from an analog source (e.g. converting VHS tapes and vinyl records to the digital format) with no background noise (white noise). This motherboard comes with on-board optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs. The board also has an SPDIF-out header (labeled “JSP1”), which can be used to route sound to the video card HDMI output in order for you to have an HDMI output with digital audio on a single connector. As you can see in Figure 5, this motherboard has fully independent analog outputs for all eight audio channels.

The MSI P55A-GD65 has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by one Realtek RTL8111DL chip, which is connected to the system using PCI Express x1 lanes, and thus not presenting any potential performance issues.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel with PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors, a clear CMOS button, coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs, a FireWire port, six USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA-300 port (shared with one of the USB 2.0 ports), one Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports (blue ones), and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel

There are other smaller features. For example, this motherboard comes with an operating system stored inside the motherboard read-only memory that allows you to access the Internet without needing to load the operating system or even without having a hard disk drive installed. This feature, called Winki, is identical in concept to the Express Gate feature available on motherboards from ASUS and the eJiffy feature present on motherboards from ECS.

This board comes with some overclocking-related hardware features that we will explore later.