Three Sandy Bridge Boards from MSI

Slowly but surely a complete picture is forming about Intel’s upcoming computer platform, Sandy Bridge. Gigabyte has recently released information about its LGA 1155 motherboards, and now it’s MSI‘s turn to let us know how we should expect future products to be like.

There isn’t much to say, it seems that these boards also have about the same features as Gigabyte versions based on P67 and H67 Intel chipsets.

The MSI H67MA-ED55 board model is the board that offers the most, because it’s an mATX board with all three types of display ports: analog VGA, DVI and HDMI. These ports connect to the integrated GPU found in Pentium, Core i3, i5 and i7 second generation of processors, which will most likely be the same type of slightly improved Intel GMA. Personally I would have liked to see a more powerful GPU in the new chips, possibly designed by nVidia, VIA or even ATI (AMD). Intel’s old and most recent integrated GPUs have been a huge disappointment when it comes to speed and hardware video decoding. In comparison with nVidia’s ION and ION2 solutions both support FullHD video decoding even with the slowestAtom processors, and let’s not forget the upcoming AMD Bobcat platform, which will include AMD Radeon HD 6250 GPUs with 80 stream processors (twice more than Radeon 4200 had) running at 500MHz, supporting hardware FullHD decoding while doing 3D calculations too.

What you need to know about this motherboard is that the two PCI-Express 16X slots don’t work in 8X mode, but only in 4X mode or 16x/4x when used separately. This handicap suggests a budget gaming solution based on only one high-end card (GTX 460/470/480/580 or Radeon 5870/5970) or based on two mainstream cards (like GTS 450 or Radeon 5570/5670), both working in 4X mode. It goes without saying that the MSI H67MA-ED55 supports all new interfaces such as S-ATA3, USB 3.0, USB 2.0, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, legacy PS/2, 6 stereo analog audio ports and a digital optical out.

The MSI P67A-GD65 motherboard comes with two PCI-Express 16X 2.0 slots working together in 8X mode, three PCI-Express 1x ports and two legacy PCI slots. This board lacks VGA output, so no integrated graphics can be used, but it offers extra USB ports, eSATA ports and an SPDIF coax port. OC Genie overclocking technology is also present, but let’s be serious, nowadays no motherboard comes without overclocking features.

The MSI P67A-GD55 motherboard is based on the same circuit board as the MSI P67A-GD65, but lacks a couple of extra features such as the eSATA ports, two internal SATA2 ports and a suspicious-looking flat power plug, instead it has two standard 4-pin plugs in addition to the 24pin ATX plug. Another observation is that there’s no heat pipe cooling solution on chips near the CPU, unlike the other two motherboards.

In conclusion, these boards seem to be standard, except for the OC Genie II feature, which is only found on MSI boards. They will probably be sold worldwide before Sandy Bridge processors appear in stores, although they cannot be used without the 2^nd generation of Intel Core processors.

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1. Sandy Bridge Released and Benchmarked | Huge Pedia says:

   January 5, 2011 at 7:04 pm

   [...] the Sandy Bridge platform this issue was resolved, all components of the processor are built into the same chip [...]