MSI P55-GD80 has several other features, most of them targeted to the overclocking community, as we will explore in the next page.

All capacitors used on this motherboard are solid, as one might expect on a high-end motherboard, and it uses a voltage regulator with a different design. Called “DrMOS,” it doesn’t use discrete MOSFET transistors, but integrated circuits containing these transistors. Each “DrMOS” chip (Renesas R2J20602) features three MOSFETs inside (“high side,” “low side” and the driver) switching at 1 MHz, instead of the 250 kHz of traditional voltage regulators, in order to increase efficiency (i.e., less energy is wasted, causing the CPU and memory to pull less energy from the power supply compared to other designs). According to MSI one “DrMOS” phase is more efficient than four traditional phases because of that design. MSI P55-GD80 uses an 8+2 design, i.e., eight phases for the CPU and two phases for the memory controller located inside the CPU, all of them using “DrMOS” technology (other motherboard models from MSI use “DrMOS” only for the CPU voltage regulator, using the standard design for the memory controller). Click here if you need more background information on motherboard phases.

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Figure 7: Overall look from the voltage regulator circuit without the heatsinks.

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Figure 8: DrMOS chips. Notice that no discrete transistors are used.

Besides having a high-end voltage regulator circuit, P55-GD80 can disable phases from the voltage regulator circuit as needed in order to save energy, feature called APS (Active Phase Switching). A display located on the middle of the motherboard shows how many CPU phases are active at the moment.

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Figure 9: CPU phases display.

MSI P55-GD80 comes with an operating system stored inside the motherboard read-only memory that allows you to access the Internet without needing to load the operating system or even without having a hard disk drive installed. This feature, called Winki, is identical in concept to the Express Gate feature available on motherboards from ASUS and the eJiffy feature present on motherboards from ECS.

This board comes with interesting overclocking-related hardware features that we will explore in the next page.

In Figure 10, you can see all the accessories that come with MSI P55-GD80. On the installation CD there is 60-day trial version from Norton Internet Security 2009.

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Figure 10: Accessories.