Earlier today, we were tipped off about the high-end MSI P55-GD80 motherboard. Looking a little eastwards, we were able to get information on its little brother, the P55-GD65, a low-frills motherboard based on the Intel P55 chipset, supporting LGA-1156 socket CPUs. This board concentrates on the feature-set the P55 chipset alone provides. The CPU is powered by a 7-phase circuit, with the active-phase switching power management feature, that turns off redundant phases when the power demand is low.

The board provides two PCI-E x16 slots (electrically x8 when both are populated), one open-ended PCI-E x4, and two PCI-E x1 slots. Two legacy PCI slots neighbour them. The PCH provides six SATA II ports, while an external JMicron controller gives out one internal SATA port, an eSATA port, and an IDE connector. Four DDR3 DIMM slots support up to 16 GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory. On the connectivity front, there are two gigabit Ethernet connections, 8-channel audio, Firewire, and USB.