A shock - but not a shocker - we were not expecting MSI to deliver.
We've looked at what is essentially all of MSI's P55-based range (or at least those that an enthusiast would buy), and what we've seen has been pretty good. Admittedly the P55-GD80 wasn't amazing, but the P55-GD65 was a nice little performer that eked out a pretty good 4.1GHz overclock. Knowing that, when we got the P55-GD85, all we expected was a simple feature bump - but what we got was something pretty darn surprising. First, though, let's have a wander around some of this board's more attractive features.
Sitting in the top-left corner of the board is the 8-pin ATX power connector, unhindered by big heatsinks and cramped components that we've seen in other designs, and it's pretty convenient for cabling. The PWM heatsinks that reside next to the LGA1156 socket are effective, and the large 8mm heatpipe that joins them is excellent at spreading the heat between the two 'sinks to get cooling performance chugging along nicely. While the socket doesn't have LGA775 mounting holes, this is only a minor point, especially considering that the socket itself is the heavy-duty LOTES version - and it's even been nickel-plated to look awesome.
Four DDR3 slots for dual-channel memory are placed next to each other just slightly too close for comfort; larger sticks will be pretty cramped, but two sticks will work fine. They're thankfully spaced far enough away from the socket to not interfere with heatsinks. The 24-pin ATX power connector lies beside a blue plastic wedge, inside which resides six hard points for measuring voltage across many different areas of the board. The spacious design ethos continues with the storage ports, providing six right-angled SATA 2.0 ports with an additional vertical port, as well as a right-angled IDE port. There are two white vertical SATA 3.0 ports also, which are RAID-able. Rounding out all the interesting features are two blue USB 3.0 ports and a single eSATA.
Hard power, reset and baseclock buttons are at the bottom of the board - hard as in they're literally etched into the PCB. A single press of a finger is all that is needed to use them, and for some reason they're just more fun than a normal button. To provide enough bandwidth with the P55 chipset and all the new 3.0 features, MSI has used a PLX chip that multiplies the PCIe lanes to provide more bandwidth, at a higher cost. Audio is from Realtek as normal, and the two PCIe slots are limited to dual 8x in Crossfire.
But getting back to what was really surprising about the P55-GD85 - its overclocking performance. Stock performance wasn't that great, and we had feared the worst when it performed poorly compared to the EVGA P55 FTW 200. However, once we hit the second OC Step the MSI board powered past the EVGA in every test, though lost it again at the third step - by a large margin.
We pushed the clocks on the i7 870 chip, and increased voltage at the same time, with initially frustrating resuls - a set voltage of 1.512v would result in an idle of 1.472v and a load of 1.40v, until we noticed that the "High Vdroop" setting was auto-enabled in the BIOS; deactivating this gave us a perfectly set voltage that increased under load slightly. We kept increasing speed, and eventually settled on 4.334GHz! These settings (197*22, 1.536v) required much more voltage to be stable, but this is the highest overclock we've squeezed out of this chip yet! Performance at this speed was actually slightly worse than at 4.114GHz (187*22, 1.45V) but it's still impressive.
In all you're getting a pretty decent board with good performance at moderate overclocks, with capacity for a lot of headroom if you're ever in the mood for some fun.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012