Unsurprisingly, MSI is also developing P55 motherboards with next-generation SATA and USB connectivity. Images of MSI's unannounced P55-GD85 have surfaced on the Coolaler forums, and it looks similar to upcoming products from Asus and Gigabyte.

Visible specifications include two PCIe x16 2.0, PCIe x1, and PCI slots, four DIMM slots for up to 16GB of DDR3 2600MHz, an eight-phase DrMOS, nine SATA ports (two are 6Gb/s), and Realtek ALC889 onboard audio. The I/O panel reveals two USB 3.0 ports (powered by NEC's controller), dual-gigabit Ethernet and other standard connections.


The P55-GD85 has a handful of overclocking features, like onboard power, reset, plus and minus buttons, as well as a header to check CPU, memory, and chipset voltages with a multimeter. It's also pointed out that the board's energy profile meets the EU's EuP requirements. Unfortunately, no price or release date accompanied the images.