MSI 1155 Intel P67 4xDDR3 SLI Crossfire USB3.0 ATX Motherboard

 

 

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Amazing Motherboard for games. Use it for raging at french people on CoD. But it makes my dad Ian rage at me. Gawd he gets on my man baps. Elana! JOBCENTRE!. Sorry about that. Also, Its mint in dewsbury. Bit too many...Yah know...Id recommend this.

An excellent motherboard and one of the highest rated in its class. Ease of overclocking and use of other features of the motherboard software.

It also runs extremely quick and is a first choice for high end gamers.

I'm building a replacement machine after previous one failed and I could not trace the cause. I chose this motherboard because it had good reviews and was recommended by a magazine I've read and trusted for years.

It arrived well packaged and spot on time, can't fault Amazon for their delivery, and it certainly looks good. Documentation comes in two booklets. There's a quick pictorial guide to the motherboard in three or four languages which shows where all the connectors are and there a user guide that describes the software.

One problem I had straight away is that this motherboard only has SATA connectors. I didn't think this would be a problem for me because all my discs were SATA, however my optical drives were not SATA so a new DVD rewriter needs to be ordered. This is an oversight on my part and does not affect my comments on the motherboard.

The second problem I had is that the newly built pc did not work. After a lot of troubleshooting, using an alternate power supply, alternate graphics card, rechecking the wiring and dismantling it to confirm that that the cpu was mounted correctly, we searched the net for a solution. We found that there have been a number of reported memory problems with this motherboard that others using G-Skill Ripjaws DDR3 had encountered. These problems may apply to other makes of RAM but once I'd found a couple of fellow sufferers I tried their suggestions and looked no further.
As part of my build I'd bought two 8Gb kits and, after much playing around, I was able to get the motherboard to complete its POST and run Windows but it would only do this with RAM in DIMM slots 3 &/or 4, if any RAM was in slots 1 &/or 2 it would not power up at all.
It didn't matter whether I filled one or two of DIMM slots 3 & 4 nor did it make any difference which set of RAM I used, I could only get this motherboard to power up if I didn't put anything in slots 1 & 2. Consequently I'm returning this item as being defective.

I cannot comment on the overclocking options because I haven't tried them, I bought this board because the reviews said it was durable and that's what's important to me. I did look at the BIOS options though, because I was taken there on the first successful boot, and they seemed very comprehensive and far too complicated for me. For me there wasn't enough text explaining what a particular setting did and whether it needed to be tweaked in tandem with another setting, but I guess if you're going to get into that level of detail it's something you probably know about already. The new style BIOS was much easier to navigate with a mouse than the old BIOS I'm used to.

Once into Windows the software installer on the DVD put a load of drivers and utilities onto my system. There's a one step 'Install All' option or you can customise what is loaded. I 'Installed All' but later found that the games supplied required a video camera in order to play them, so they were quickly uninstalled.
Somehow I managed to install MSI's Click Bios II software but that does not support this motherboard so that's also been uninstalled.
Also available is a 60 day trial of a Norton product, either the anti virus or the internet security suite - I ignored it and I'm right now I'm not sure which one it was, and Norton on-line backup that was probably another trial but, again, I didn't install it so I can't really say.

The software that looks to be the most useful is the
- Video Genie that does something to enhance video playback, haven't tried this
- Teaming Genie that balances the load when multiple network cards are detected
- Audio Genie for speaker setting and THX mode selection. The THX software crashed on my PC but this is probably something I could fix if I were keeping the motherboard.
- Control Centre which is where all the monitoring and tweaking through Windows takes place.
- Live Update 5 that scans the machine and looks for updates for utilities and drivers. Its supposed to download and install but I found I had to run the install processes manually, probably some setting that I could tweak if I were keeping the motherboard.
- Then there's something called 'Supercharger' which reconfigures USB ports to deliver increased voltage so that an iPad can be recharged. I imagine this could be very useful to iPad users but it's not for me.

So overall I give this product two stars. It has a problem which prevents all RAM slots being used and, looking on the net, there seem to be others with very similar problems. Normally that would be one star and a short, derogatory comment. However I did eventually get it to work after a fashion and when I did I thought the supplied utilities and software looked pretty good.
If it were fully functional I believe it would meet all my needs for many years to come.

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