14 DAY TRIAL // Lately the number of LGA 1155 motherboards previews has been on the rise and today it’s MSI's turn to get two of their upcoming Sandy Bridge motherboards previewed, namely the P67A-GD65 and the P67A-GD55, these two mainstream boards coming in as nearly identical twins.
This preview comes from the TweakTown website that during a tour around Taipei, Taiwan, managed to get their hands on both the GD55 and GD65 and were gracious enough to make a brief video to introduce these two motherboards to the rest of us.
As it can be clearly seen from the video, both boards look strikingly similar, so similar in fact that the TweakTown editor presents the GD55 throughout most of the video thinking it is the GD65.
Powered by Intel's P67 chipset, the motherboards come with two PCIe slots with Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFire support, featuring what MSI likes to call a Military Class II design that makes use of a six phase power SFC choke setup that should provide up to 30% better efficiency than standard chokes, as well as 100% Hi-c CAP's and Japanese made solid capacitors with a claimed life-time of 10 years.
Furthemore, both motherboards come with MSI's OC Genie II that allows users to overclock the CPU by simply hitting a button placed on the motherboard itself.
If an MSI H67 motherboard is used, the button will overclock the processor integrated graphics instead of the CPU.
Taking a good look at the boards, the layout seems to be pretty clean, with no major design constraints, the CPU socket area coming with enough room for even the largest air coolers around.
Taking a look at the GD65 and GD55 side by side reveals just how much these two motherboards have in common, from what I can tell, the GD65 is coming in with just two extra SATA posts and a so-called V-Check Point, where you can check CPU , VTT, PCH and DRAM voltages against what you set in the BIOS.
Unfortunately, no information about the retail price is known at this time, the boards being expected to be launched during CES, at the same time with Sandy Bridge processors.