MSI Big Bang -Trinergy

Testbed Setup

We utilized memory kits from Corsair and G.Skill to verify memory compatibility on our test boards. Our OS and primary applications are loaded on the OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD drive and our games operate off the WD Caviar Black 1TB drive. We did a clean install of the OS and applications for each motherboard.

We used Intel's stock cooler for the stock comparison testing, while water-cooling via the superlative Heat Killer 3.0 water block was utilized for overclocking. For graphics duty, we used MSI's 275 Lighting GPUs to provide performance comparisons between boards and to test SLI scaling in our gaming benchmarks.

For our test results we set up each board as closely as possible in regards to memory timings. Otherwise all other settings are left on auto. The P55 utilized 8GB of DDR3 (apart from DFI's MI-T36 which is limited to 4GB), while the X58 platform contained 6GB. The P55 and X58 DDR3 timings were set to 7-7-7-20 1T at DDR3-1600 for the i7-920 and i7-870 processors at both stock and overclocked CPU settings.

We used DDR3-1333 6-6-6-18 1T timings for the i5-750 stock setup for all system benchmarks (non gaming tests) as DDR3-1600 is not natively supported at a stock BCLK setting of 133. We had early BIOS releases that offered the native 1600 setting but stability was a serious problem and support was pulled for the time being. Performance is essentially the same between the two settings.

Non-3D test results are all identical to the GD-65, so we've not spent too much of our time re-running the same tests for the same numbers. We're not providing a running commentary for that section of benchmarks as there are no discernable performance differences when running each of these boards at the same operating frequency. We've condensed the application tests down to the most important and have put more focus on the gaming side of things for this article given the nature of the board we're reviewing today.