 Today I'm going to be having a look at a refresh motherboard from MSI. So this is the P55A G55. It's going to be very similar to their previous P55 boards except for a couple of things. First of all, you've got support for SATA 6 gigabit per second. And second of all, you've got support for USB 3. This also features their military class concept, which means you've got top quality components including IC chokes and solid caps. So IC chokes, MSI claims run it up to 20 degrees lower than regular chokes. And their solid caps, they claim has a minimum of a 10 year lifetime. So it gives you a long lifetime, low temperature, which we've covered already, as well as high stability and better overclocking. Let's get this board opened right up and have a look at what we find inside. We've got a drivers and utilities DVD. We've got a user's guide for their hard drive backup software. We've got a quick installation guide. Their user's guide for MSI Winkie software control center. So this is their software for system monitoring, overclocking and power saving. Gives you a quick guide on how to use it. Ooh, full color and everything. Look at that. I love seeing full color manuals and pamphlets. It's just, it's that those extra little touches. Here's their full user guide, which is in a number of languages, English, Deutsch, French. I don't know how to pronounce Russian. Okay. We've got an IO shield for the back, which clearly labels your USB 3.0 ports. I might point out one SATA cable, a Molex to SATA power adapter and an IDE cable. That is an odd, odd load of accessories. I would have expected to see maybe like four SATA cables and then no Molex to SATA power adapter and no IDE cable. That might've made a little bit more sense. I've actually talked to MSI about that and they're looking at improving their bundles for future motherboards. So yeah, how about that? Okay. Let's have a look at the board itself. The board itself is awesome looking. Okay, really? Hold on. I should go back to this cable thing. Realistically, if you're anything like me, look at this. You've got a ton of SATA cables lying around. It doesn't really matter here. I bet I can find more just in this room. What do we got in here? We got some video cards. We got some more video cards. We got some SSDs. There we go. Two more SATA cables. That was hard. Anyway, yeah, SATA cables are not a big deal, but if it includes them, then great. All right, so let's have a look at the board layout. First of all, you've got your 8-pin power connector in its ideal location up on the top left-hand edge of the board. You've got a nice little heat sink on your voltage regulators. Down here, you've got active phase switching power savings. So what this does is it determines how many phases of the power delivery system the CPU is actually using. When the CPU is under heavier load, it'll enable more of them for more stable power. And when the CPU is under light load, it'll actually disable some for some power savings. So that's a pretty cool feature. Here's your old DA1156 socket. This is a load socket, so you can be assured that it will make good contact with the pins between the motherboard and the pads on the bottom of the CPU. Next, we have dual-channel DDR3 memory support up to 16 gigs, presumably. You've got a 24-pin power connector on the right-hand edge of the board exactly where it belongs. Now, in terms of things that you can plug into this board, we've got six SATA 2, and these are actually in a fairly good layout. I saw these ones here, and I kind of went, ooh, that might be bad. But it's okay, because even if you've got a dual-slot graphics card here, it's only going to cover up to about here, which is where they're using the right-angle connectors. And if you need to use these, you definitely can, even with a card installed here and a card installed there. So that should be fine. And then once again, they've got the two SATA 6 gigabit per second ports also coming right out of the board. And that shouldn't be a problem either, because the second dual-slot graphics card would go here, and it would be well out of the way of that as well. Here's your IDE port. That's a right-angle port, because that would be in the way of a bottom graphics card. And then what else do we have on here? We've got a couple of OC switches. We've got their clear CMOS jumper. And we have a power switch, which is great if you're benching this board on an open test bench. We've got two front USB headers. We've got our front panel connectors, so that's for your power switch, LEDs, all that good stuff. And then we've also got a floppy connector, just in case you still need one of those. The audio connector is down at the very bottom left of the board, near the audio chipset, which is right here. It's a Realtek chipset. Now in terms of expansion, this is one of the things I really like about the way MSI engineers their boards. Instead of leaving a spot here, like many other manufacturers do, and installing only six expansion slots on their motherboards, MSI actually puts the extra work into it, does the routing that's necessary to make sure that they can put a slot right at the top, and that means that you can install up to seven expansion cards. Because really, nobody installs seven expansion cards, very few people. But if you're installing two dual slot graphics cards, that leaves you with one, two, three. If you only have six, that leaves you with only two, and lots of people want to install three expansion cards besides their graphics versus two. So there you go. That is why I'm such a big fan of the way MSI does their boards with seven expansion slots versus only six on many of their competitors. Here's the P55 chipset that is running this particular board. And then let's move around to the back where we will see all of our input and output on the back panel. So we have optical audio out in a location that I've never seen it before. But I think the reason they've done this is it leaves way more room for tons of USB ports. We have a PS2 combo port, eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, one gigabit ethernet, and 7.1 audio out. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the P55A G55 motherboard from MSI.