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- Date:
- Saturday , May 15, 2010
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
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MSI P55-CD53 Motherboard Review
MSI has been on a roll with their high end LGA1156 boards. Unfortunately some companies falter when it comes to more budget oriented offerings. Is this true of MSI as well, or will their streak of excellence continue? We give the $110 MSI P55-CD53 a good hard look to answer that question.
Introduction
MSI has been around for some time now. Its had some ups and downs over the years but recently its really stepped up to the plate and offered products that are not only very good, but unique. And I don't mean in that "special" kind of unique that makes you wonder what the engineers were smoking when they designed the thing. MSI's OC Genie feature for example is automated overclocking that not only works, but gets you really good results with literally no hassles. Let's face it, most of the top tier motherboard makers have good to excellent flagship boards. Most hardware review sites rarely slam any of those because almost always, each of these boards is really quite good. When you get down to the budget sector the picture often changes and while you might still get a good board, many times those are plagued with quirks or you have to trade off something good for that low price. Features, overclocking, stability or whatever.
Make no mistake, the P55-CD53 is a budget oriented offering. While it isn't a bottom dollar or loss leader type of offering, you won't find CrossfireX or SLI support, or even USB 3.0 and SATA 6G among its features. What will you find? Rock solid stability and overclocking that is really unbelievable for a board with such a minimalistic approach to its design. The P55-CD53 motherboard can be purchased at Newegg for about $110.
The MSI P55-CD53 is an attractive looking yet small board that doesn't impress too much by its looks. There is no sea of power phases. There is no heavily stylized heat pipe assemblies, cool slogans, multi-meter measuring points, or a ton of really cool looking LEDs. There are far too many legacy PCI slots on it and only one PCI-Express x16 slot. Really this isn't the type of board you get excited about when you're used to seeing motherboards that cost $250 or more crossing your test bench all the time. This board, like many others is a P55 Express chipset based board designed for use with Intel's Core i3/i5/i7 LGA1156 offerings. What floored me was the four phase power design. Yes you read that right, 4 power phases and that's it folks. Though the old adage of "quality, not quantity" certainly does apply to power phases on motherboards. Actually, according to the back of the box, there is another single phase which they refer to as "1 phase Dr. MOS".
Physical examination of the board confirms this as there is another phase near the CPU socket for a 4+1 configuration. Additionally the back of the board's box makes mention of the phases being capable of 1000KHz operation which is pretty stout. That's not quite up to par with something along the lines of the EVGA X58 3X SLI Classified, but pretty good given the board's price point. From what I can tell through physical examination of the board, it looks like MSI went with three phases on the memory slots. This seems to be pretty standard on higher end boards and it's good to see this filtering into more budget oriented offerings as well. The board also supports DDR3 memory speeds up to 2133MHz, which is impressive. It shows that while this is a more budget oriented board, it is still made with the enthusiast in mind. To that end MSI also included their "Direct OC" function which essentially amounts to plus and minus keys on the motherboard PCB that allow you to overclock in real time, through hardware while being inside a Windows OS. While MSI has their own clever names for their feature set this is a feature that very much resembles features we've seen on other boards from ASUS and others.
This brings me to the next feature I want to talk about. The "Winki" feature. Yeah, I know I don't really care for the name either. It accompanies the slogan "Explore your world in the blink of an eye." I have to admit that my first thought when I saw the Winki manual while I was un-boxing the board was a scene in Ace Ventura Pet Detective where Jim Carrey shouts, "He found Captain Winki!" Which is in reference to a scene that's a little disturbing to say the least. I couldn't get over that for about five or six minutes. At any rate the purpose of this feature eludes me to some degree though I can think of a few uses for it. Essentially it is a proprietary OS which you can install onto a flash drive and boot from. The Winki OS allows you to perform some basic tasks with the machine without loading Windows onto the machine. It has web capability, instant messaging, photo viewing, Skype support, and a file manager. Outside of diagnostic use for someone with only one computer, I can't honestly see much use for this. I think enthusiasts will probably ignore this and use a Linux boot CD if they need something along these lines. This feature is similar to one found on the more recent ASUS boards but instead of being embedded in hardware the Winki OS has to be installed onto a flash drive or other disk.
Unlike most boards hitting the market now, this one does not have USB3.0 or SATA 6G support. It does support eight SATA 3G ports, two of which are provided by the JMicron JMB363 controller chip. The usual and excellent "OC Genie" feature is supported as well. I'm glad to see this because it works very well on other MSI boards that have it. The board features only a single PCI-Express x16 slot and therefore Crossfire and SLI are unsupported features. That is unless you are running SLI or Crossfire on a card ala the GeForce GTX 295 or Radeon HD 5970.
Following industry trends, the MSI P55-CD53 only requires a few components to create a fully functional machine. The required components are: LGA1156 CPU, DDR 3 memory, power supply, drives, and a video card. MSI integrated the following components into the P55-CD53: 8 SATA 3G ports, (6 via the P55 chipset and 2 via the JMicron controller), 14 USB 2.0 ports (10 ports on the backplane, and 4 ports available via 2 headers supporting 2 ports each), 1 gigabit Ethernet port, six mini-headphone jacks, 1 PS/2 keyboard port and 1 PS/2 mouse port. The MSI P55-CD53 is a pretty lean board in general.
Main Specifications Overview:
Detailed Specifications Overview:
Packaging
Packaging is really basic but our board arrived intact and well protected. The accessories included are fairly minimal including; User guide, quick installation guide, OC Genie booklet, HDD backup user guide, "Winki" user guide, driver disk, two SATA cables, 4-pin Molex to SATA power cable, IDE and floppy cables, I/O shield and OC Genie sticker.
Board Layout
The layout of the P55-CD53 is excellent. There really isn't any room for me to complain about. Everything from the location of the power connectors, to the expansion slots, memory slots, SATA ports, and headers are all well thought out. I can remove or install memory modules with a large video card installed, and the CPU area is very clean. MSI did a good job here.
The CPU socket is among the cleanest I've seen on any modern motherboard. Due to the minimal amount of capacitors and power phases the CPU socket area seems a little too empty. You should be able to fit the largest coolers you can think of on this board without any problems.
The MSI P55-CD53 has 4 DDR 3 DIMM slots for a total maximum memory capacity of 16GB. The memory slots are appropriately color coded and the memory slots themselves are clear of any obstacles that could prevent the use of taller memory modules or RAM coolers. Again as I said earlier, you can install RAM with the video card in the system which is always a good thing.
The P55 Express chipset is a unified design unlike most other Intel chipsets. Therefore the south bridge and north bridge are one in the same. The chipset is located where the south bridge used to be housed on older designs. It is sandwiched between the SATA ports, PCI-Express x16 slot, and the first legacy PCI slot. It is cooled by a small passive heat sink that has been made flat to avoid interfering with peripheral card installation. During stock and overclocked operations, the heat sink never went past "being warm to the touch." Not terribly scientific I know, but it seemed to be adequate at the very least. The board's 6 black SATA ports are attached to the board's P55 Express chipset. The blue SATA ports in the corner are attached to the JMicron JMB363 controller. The IDE ports and floppy controller are also part of the JMicron solution.
The P55-CD53 has an excellent slot configuration. Though I have to say that I have to question the purpose behind including 3 PCI slots on a modern motherboard. I guess this could be useful for some people, but I think only a small niche of individuals would want this many PCI slots at this point in time. There is only one PCI-Express x16 slot here so Crossfire and SLI are right out. Still there are plenty of PCI-Express x1 slots included on the board. Two of which are placed where you can access them even with a video card equipped with a dual slot cooling solution is installed.
The backplane of the P55-CD53 is clean, but devoid of many of the usual connectors we are often used to seeing. There are no eSATA ports, SPIDF ports, or anything like that. What we do have are ten USB ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, one RJ-45 Ethernet port and six-mini-stereo jacks for audio output. So again this is a pretty no frills solution.
Control Center
MSI has changed its bundled utility out for something a little more sleek, and a little leaner. This one is simply referred to as the "Control Center" and it is more streamlined that software / monitoring / overclocking tools that I've seen from MSI in the past. Basically we are left with some elegant looking windows with simplified functionality.
Initially system information is displayed defaulting to the motherboard category. Additional information is separated by sub-category allowing us to easily identify what all the information pertains to. Important information such as BIOS version and processor information is displayed here. You do see information for basic audio and video settings, as well as the network controller. Under the CPU menu on the left hand side we can see more detailed information about the installed CPU. CPU clocks, stepping, manufacturing process, and of course cache information are displayed here. On the left hand side we can also see a section for memory. This shows not only what type of memory, and how much is installed, but the SPD tables are viewable here as well.
Under the Overclocking section things change a bit. Under the overclocking section we only have a basic tab, which allows you to do a fair amount of the things I've ever seen software overclocking tools allow you to do. I'm not sure why it says basic, and has no advanced menu, or why it doesn't just say "advanced" or nothing at all. Base clock, CPU Vcore, PCH, DRAM voltage, DDR VREF, and even fan thresholds are found here. Additionally there are Green Power settings. Here you can setup power saving profiles, or disable them. You can also monitor your power savings over time. Under the Advanced Green Power settings you get the mainboard and LED tabs. You can reduce the number of power phases in use, and adjust system fan speeds. You may also save your settings to be used as profiles later on. The LED tab allows you to turn on or disable the motherboards CPU power phase LEDs.