MSI H57M-ED65

Like Asus’ P7H57D-V EVO, MSI’s board uses the more high-end Intel H57 Express chipset. As a result it costs more than the two H55 motherboards here.

Testing the board we found it offered mixed performance. While its Cinebench 10 multi-CPU benchmark result of 8,310 was the second highest score here, the MSI was slower than both H55 motherboards in our DivX 7, Lame 3.97 and WinRAR tests, though by small margins. Its gaming performance too proved somewhat average, as both of its game results were faster than ECS’ H55H-CM but slower than Gigabyte’s $50 cheaper H55M-UD2H.

Studying the expansion options the MSI came off as middle of the road again; while it has more SATA ports than the two H55 boards, it is the only board in this round up to ship without any PCI slots. If you’re upgrading your rig and have PCI-based devices this isn’t the board for you.

Moving into the motherboard’s BIOS the MSI impressed. It offers decent overclocking options with reasonably lengthy frequency and voltage ranges and if you’re the type of user that likes to run his rig at different sets of tune, the BIOS offers six overclocking profiles.
Thanks to this you can have your rig setup with a high overclock for gaming or even underclock for when you don’t need all the power and just want a cool-running machine.