![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Saturday , May 15, 2010
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
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.
BIOS
The MSI P55-CD53 uses the American Megatrends Incorporated BIOS or "AMI" BIOS for short. BIOS version 1.3 was used for all screen shots and general testing.
The BIOS of the P55-CD53 is pretty standard fair for boards of this type. Everything is divided into categories and within those categories are settings that pertain to them. The BIOS for the P55-CD53 in general is very basic, yet robust enough to make most people happy. The standard CMOS features menu contains the time and date settings, floppy drive settings, halt, and a sub-menu for system information. System information is pretty basic. It outlines the BIOS version, build date, installed CPU type, installed memory, the CPU's current operating frequency, and processor cache information. The advanced BIOS features menu contains a boot sequence submenu, BIOS flash protection, full screen logo, MPS, IOAPIC settings, HPET, etc.
The Integrated peripherals menu contains all your settings for the motherboard's integrated hardware. Here you can control legacy USB settings or disable the onboard LAN controller, LAN option ROMs or adjust the secondary RAID controller. Which in this case is the JMicron JMB363. Also there are two additional submenus here. One is the On-Chip ATA devices menu and the other is the I/O devices menu. The former contains settings for PCI bus mastering, and the SATA controller mode. The I/O devices menu only has COM and parallel port settings. These are disabled by default as you'd need an I/O bracket to use them anyway. There are headers for these on the motherboard. The power management setup screen has the obligatory ACPI settings, restore on AC power loss, and wake up event setup settings.
Next is the hardware monitor or "H/W monitor" for short. The H/W monitor contains chassis intrusion settings, CPU Smart fan target, and controls for both "SYS" fan headers should there actually be anything attached to those. Also displayed is the PC health status. CPU temperature, system temperature, and fan speeds are shown here. At the bottom below those are voltage ranges for 3.3v, 5v, and 12v power. The green power menu has two settings in it. CPU phase control, which is your active phase switching. This setting allows the system to disable unnecessary power phases in order to reduce power consumption. The system will switch which phase is active at any given time to reduce heat and "wear" each phase evenly.
The cell menu is MSI's fancy term for "overclocking stuff". Like other boards that use the Cell menu, this one displays the current CPU and memory frequencies at the top. This one also shows the current QPI frequency settings. Below that we have the CPU specifications and CPU feature submenus. You can toggle your CPU cores here as well as enable or disable C1E and EIST. The adjust CPU base frequency is the bus clock which determines the processors final clock speed. The OC Stepping menu is basically a semi-automatic way of overclocking. This is just like the CPU level up feature found on ASUS boards. Essentially you just tell the board what CPU you want to mimic, and the board takes care of the rest. Though it can't add support for HyperThreading or add extra cores, it certainly can increase your CPU speed. While some people may or may not find this useful, I don't. The OC Genie works VERY well and I'd suggest that if you want hassle free overclocking, that's the method to use. However there is nothing wrong with having additional choices.
There are also two settings that pertain to overclocking before you start scrolling down into the rest of the Cell menu. Those are OC Genie button operation and the base clock button. These of course enable or disable the OC Genie and plus/minus buttons on the board's PCB. I have no idea why you'd want to turn them off, but you can. Stepping back a bit to the earlier submenus, the CPU specifications menu gives you the basic CPU specifications and gives you yet another submenu. This just shows you what technologies the CPU supports. MMX, SSE3, etc. The CPU Feature menu gives you the ability to adjust CPU features such as EIST, C-State, execute disable, and virtualization. You can enable or disable all of them. Jumping back to the Cell menu itself, we see more submenus and more settings.
The first of these is the Memory-Z menu. This shows you two settings for viewing individual modules SPD tables. From here you can also view XMP support information if your memory supports this feature. Back in the Cell menu again we see Clockgen Tuner, and a whole host of other settings. Chief among them is the PCI-Express frequency adjustment. Then we get into voltage settings. There aren't as many as I've seen on other higher end boards, but you can adjust DRAM voltage, CPU voltage, and CPU PLL voltages. PCH voltage can also be adjusted. Lastly in the Cell menu is the Spread Spectrum settings which are usually best left disabled for overclocking.
We also have the M-Flash menu which allows you to update each of the board's BIOS ROMs independently. You may also backup the BIOS ROM from here and store it anywhere you like. Lastly we have the overclocking profile menu. This is where you can define and save settings into profiles. Here we can see a default profile which I can reload at any time.
Overall I found the BIOS to be easy enough to navigate and robust enough to allow me to get the board to do what I wanted even in regard to overclocking.