MSi P55-GD80

The MSi P55- GD80 is a high-end Intel P55 ATX motherboard with an LGA 1156 designed primarily for Intel Core i3, i5, or i7 CPUs. Featured is support for eight SATA-II drives, Gigabit LAN, USB 2.0, eSATA, FireWire, six audio jacks, optical/coaxial SPDIF, and dual-channel DDR3 RAM.

Critics especially herald the unit’s overclocking ability (one reviewer reached 4.5GHz), especially since overclocking is well managed by OC Genie—thereby making the experience a lot less stressful. There are some concerns however, including a limit of only 16 PCIe lanes available on the graphics ports, and somewhat inferior baseline performance compared to Intel defaults. This is due in part to the limitations OC Genie places on the more detailed options of the BIOS, mainly the memory divider.