- Date:
- Monday , June 07, 2010
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Share:

MSI X58 PRO-E Motherboard Review
We take a look at another offering from MSI. Think of this one as a budget oriented X58 board that's pretty much all business. It brings SLI and CrossfireX support to a more mainstream price point. The board's packaging sports a "Gaming Series" logo on it which is a telltale sign of who they are targeting with this product.
Overclocking
All in all overclocking the X58 PRO-E was standard for any X58 chipset based board with a couple of quirks added into the mix. As usual, among the first things I did was upgrade the BIOS to the latest version. So BIOS version 8.B was used for all the overclocking and stability testing while overclocked. I also disabled all the CPU features excluding HyperThreading. So Virtualization, C1E, etc., were all turned off. I also disabled the spread spectrum support which also seems to cause issues here and there on some boards.
Among the first things I figured out with this board is that the Patriot Viper memory requires a TON of voltage to have any kind of stability around DDR3 1500MHz speeds or better. Most of this memory shouldn't be pushed much past 1.65v. (Editor's Note: This is a very debatable statement on memory voltage.) However I needed 1.75v for any kind of stability.
I noticed right away that reaching the full potential of the memory was right out. DDR3 1850MHz was the best I could achieve using this hardware combination. Using DDR3 1850MHz speeds severely limited my BCLK frequencies. At best I could hit 185MHz and that was all. When I dropped down to DDR3 1600MHz speeds I was able to take the BCLK frequency to 200MHz without issue. Basically you can either do a higher BCLK with lower memory speeds or higher memory speeds with a lesser BCLK. Once I broke 185MHz BCLK with the DDR3 memory frequency lowered down to around DDR3 1600MHz speeds I found that increased CPU cCore was a must. Not that such a thing was in any way odd or shocking. A setting of 1.416v was needed to hit 4.0GHz and do so with stability.
When all was said and done the X58 PRO-E is a solid run of the mill X58 board when it came to overclocking. I couldn't gain any real stability past 200MHz BCLK. It has been some time since I've seen that. The system was "kind of stable" up to about 210MHz, but no matter what I did the thing never ended up being perfectly stable. I'd run 3 hours of Prime 95 and once I'd close the utility the system would blue screen on me. It didn't seem to matter that it weathered the torture test for any period of time first. Below are two stable configurations I tested. One favors lesser BCLK speed for higher memory clocks while the other favors a higher BCLK and lower memory clocks.
4.01GHz (200.5 x20) DDR3 1604MHz
3.71GHz (185.5 x20) DDR3 1855MHz
Conclusion
Dan's Thoughts:
While I like the board's price point, layout and features I'm left with that "meh" feeling. The board was good, but not great. It wasn't great at anything really. Overclocking was just OK and even a little quirky. Stability was excellent but nothing I've not seen other boards do just as well. It had a good feature set but again nothing outstanding. I also find it harder and harder to recommend anything that doesn't have USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support going forward. So while this board wasn't bad, I think you can probably get more for your money, or at the very least you can get more for a little bit more money.
Kyle's Thoughts:
I feel a bit different about this board than Dan. First let's keep in mind that is MSI X58 board is priced at $159.99 after $30 MIR with Free Shipping as of publication of this article. This price certainly might have fallen since Dan wrote his conclusion. All that said, $160 for a solid X58 motherboard is a hell of a deal.
My biggest issue out of the box was running our RAM at 1600MHz, which we do with all X58 motherboards. It is one of those things that HardOCP expects work "correctly." We generally set the RAM to run at 8-8-8-24-1T at 1.66v. Usually we have no issue with this. I tried this with 4 different sets of RAM that we know to run at these settings, but no dice on the Pro-E. I found that moving the vDimm up to 1.75v solved these issues. While I see that Dan takes issue with running RAM at this voltage, I would suggest that with "good" RAM this should not be an issue as long as you have proper system cooling in place.
I ran a multiple day Torture Test with our MSI Pro-E without any issues. After that I incubated the motherboard and the ambient temperature quickly climbed to 58C and held steady. This is HOT, even for an X58 motherboard. Still the MSI X58 Pro-E held true and stable with a 24 hour incubated Torture Test.
The Bottom Line
The MSI X58 PRO-E represents a great value in X58 desktop computing. It is basically a "no-frills" motherboard that gives middle-of-the-road overclocking performance (which is good), few extras (most notably lacking new USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps), but retains all the basic enthusiast features that you would expect on an overclocker's motherboard. Checking prices at Newegg today shows the MSI X58 PRO-E being the second least expensive X58 motherboard coming in at $159.99 after $30 MIR with Free Shipping. An X58 being this affordable certainly starts making it an alternative to an LGA 1156 build if you thought you were boxed in on price alone.






