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Installation and Test System Notes

When I tell you that installation was uneventful, it’s a good thing!

With a little patience and occasional browsing of the user’s manual, anyone can install the MSI P55-GD65 Motherboard. Even though we’re working with Windows 7 RC builds around here, the system was up and running quickly thanks to the usable drivers on the included discs.

Here’s what we came up for a test system today:

Since Windows 7 is still fairly new, there aren’t a lot of driver options to choose from out there. However, we did seek out the latest BIOS, motherboard .INF, and video card drivers as available at the time of this writing. The default video card driver settings were used throughout testing.

Over our previous Lynnfield review, we are using some more comprehensive benchmarks to suss out any weaknesses in our test platform. Test suite selections included SiSOFT SANDRA, Cinebench R10, PCMark Vantage, 3DMark Vantage, Crysis, and RightMark Audio. These benchmarks should cover overall system performance from the smallest to the large component. This should help point out the strongest and weakest links in any system.

Synthetic Benchmarks

SANDRA provides a large array of benchmarks especially in regards to the CPU and Memory Bandwith since all the Core i5 and i7 Processors have integrated memory controllers. The MSI P55-GD65 will be pitted against the reference Intel platform.

SANDRA CPU Benchmark

MSI_P55-GD65_Motherboard_Graph_14

It’s not uncommon to see Intel’s motherboards lead this benchmark. Sometimes, they really leave the competition in the dust. Here, we can see that both systems prove very capable at processing numbers.

SANDRA Memory Bandwidth

MSI_P55-GD65_Motherboard_Graph_09

Think of your system’s memory bandwidth as a river carrying your processor. The faster it goes, the more data that can be processed by the CPU. These P55 systems can haul butt in this respect churning out 19 GB/s a second. With the CPU pushing 4 GHz and memory at 2 GHz, memory bandwidth tops 26 GB/s (graph not shown).

Cinebench R10

MSI_P55-GD65_Motherboard_Graph_02

Here, you get another look at the system’s rendering capabilities. If the system were weak in any respect, you’d see much lower numbers as rendering taxes both CPU and Memory alike.

PCMark Vantage

PCMark Vantage more fully measures your system’s overall capabilities. 3DMark Vantage just happens to be useful for measuring overall graphic and processor performance. You can download either if you’d like to see how your own system’s performance stacks up to ours.

MSI_P55-GD65_Motherboard_Graph_11

The scores are pretty close overall with a couple varying in favor of the competitor. Intel boards always seem well tuned for productivity when it comes to the Futuremark benchmark software.

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