MSi P55A-GD65

The MSi P55A-GD65 is a mid-range to high-end ATX motherboard similar to the MSi P55A-GD55. Its main advantage over the P55A-GD55 is its PCI-E Expansion Switch design which provides faster, 'truer' SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0.

Otherwise, the P55A-GD65 and P55A-GD55 sport the same basic features, including an LGA1156 CPU socket, support for up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM and ATI CrossFireX/Nvidia SLI support.

The P55A-GD65's PCI-E Expansion Switch design eliminates the speed bottleneck present in Intel's P55 chipset, allowing for 500MB/s transfer speeds, doubling the speeds of high-performance features such as SATA III and USB 3.0. Its LGA1156 CPU socket allows the P55A-GD65 to utilize any Intel Core i3, i5 or i7-8xx processor while its four DIMM slots allow for up to 16GB of dual-channel DDR3 RAM with data transfer rates of 1066 or 1333 MHz as well as 1600, 2000 and 2133 MHz overclocked. Meanwhile, the P55A-GD65's two PCIe x16 expansion slots support both ATI CrossFireX and Nvidia SLI dual-GPU setups, allowing for easily expandable graphical performance.