MSI P55-CD53 ATX Intel Motherboard

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got one for my work computer it works great, have Windows 7 Ult 64 and the over clocks is so easy.

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I've had a lot of problems with the PCI slots not properly recognizing a 1394 card. MSI was stumped, even tried another MB with same results, but now they released v4.4 bios and that seems to have fixed things. Use Intel Matrix 8.8, not 8.9, tons of problems with the latest from Intel.

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This is a nice middle of the road motherboard. It has a nice mix of features and performance and comes with the 1 Second Overclocking, but I haven't used it yet. It would have been nice to have a eSATA port included, but with the introduction of USB 3.0, it's not much of a loss.

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Only issue I had was the RAM slots. You have to have the RAM in the right two slots or you get three beeps when trying to post. Switched it to the other two slots and Bingo. Rec. the I5 CPU and booted right up. Great so far. The board does everything automatically if you are setting it up stock . Recog. the DDR3 RAM and CPU without any issues.

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first time using an msi board - so far i am happy. installed windows7 easily enough. no problems, but i have only had for about 2 weeks and haven't overclocked yet.

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This board is very nice if you want the 1156 socket. It's clean and simple to use, and the overclocking capability is great. I have my I5 at 3.6 with little voltage increases to RAM.

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MSI board has some of the best features I've seen on a motherboard in a long time including the new ASUS 1156 socket line. If you want to overclock your machine with the OC genie, make sure you have all the right hardware in place. I mean ALL OF THE HARDWARE. With the press of a button (OC Genie), your machine can go from Core i5 stock speed of 2.6Ghz to 3.4Ghz stable. If you have mid range parts, don't bother to OC as your machine will not boot.

Comment:
For the price, you can't beat it. Very nice board for the price with a good feature set unknown at this price point for this socket. Good placement of all the stuff. OC genie works very nice, boosted my i5 to 3.5ghz without an entry in the BIOS.

Comment:
This is a very nice motherboard for the price. It has some nice extra features which I have yet to test. For example, OC Genie is supposed to be the easiest method to overclock a CPU and is supposed to beat Intel Turbo Boost by 15% across the board. You will need a better cpu cooler to test this though. Nice. Also has Winki, which is a sort of built in OS which allows you to boot from a cd or usb drive and instantly access the net and built in software like open office and instant messaging programs.