MSI P55a Fuzion Review
A Close Look
Published: 7th August 2010 | Source: MSI | Price: £250 est. |
A Close Look
If the key to a products packaging is to make it distinctive and eye-catching, the Fuzion has it absolutely nailed. Big product name, the major key feature in a little information panel, and a nice subtle logo that neatly shows the merger between teams red and green (ATI and nVidia) in a cross. One could almost say a fusion of the two technologies.
The rear of the box still rightly gives most of its attention to the Fuzion side of things, leaving the bottom half to cover the power phases, military class chokes etc.
Opening up the box we find quite a small supply of accessories. The fairly standard SATA cables and IO Shield, along with the motherboard manual, and a separate manual for the Lucid chip.
Taking look at the board itself we see that MSI have stuck to the gorgeous black and blue look, with gun-metal .. umm.. metal. It really does look fabulous in the flesh and is such a change from the standard red and black it's just nice to see something different.
There are two main PCI-e x16 slots a good distance apart, which should make sure that even a huge tri-slot cooler like the Toxic we recently reviewed will happily fit without fouling against the second card. Besides those two we have a couple of PCI-e x1 slots and a couple of legacy PCI ones. Below there are the usual headers we'd expect to see, and the power/reset switches. These are very strange as normally there are either actual buttons (similar to the OC Genie one just to the right) or the motherboard has the power and reset symbols printed on. These are totally blank, but still work just as you'd expect.
On the bottom right hand corner are three USB headers, front panel connections etc. The front panel follows the seemingly standard MSI plan of being neither colour-coded nor labelled. I don't know how many of us have the manual to hand when swapping motherboards around, but the addition of some method of 'at a glance' identification would go a long way.
On backplate we have the fairly standard headers for keyboard and mouse, SPDIF, USB3.0, LAN. It's nice to see a CMOS clear between the PS2 and SPDIF. Just another little touch for those times when you've built the rig into your case but still need to clear the CMOS without wanting to pull your rig apart.
Finally on the right we have the OC Genie chip that does all the magic when you press the button on the board for the auto-overclock.
Most Recent Comments
Also... If it's only Physx he wants the 460 for it's a terrible waste of cash. A 240 would do it, 8800GT would do it, 9800GT would do it and so on. Recently on this site I ran a test using a 8800 Ultra alongside a 3870x2 and my Physx score in Fluidmark was identical to that of some one who had a 8800 GTS.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Physx technology that is integrated onto the cards that can run it (240, 8800 GT and so on) is all the same. I mean, if you think about it logically those PCI Physx cards are apparently every bit as good as the Physx that runs on any Nvidia card. I think that the Physx is on the die of the main GPU but a seperate entity.
Also, when I run my 8800U as a Physx card it *never* gets hotter than idle temps. Which just goes to show to me it's either not working very hard at all or if it is then it's not breaking any sweat at all.
I know that this site does not review things in the interest of geeks and science like I do. Fair play to that, they are a new product reviewer. But I would be terribly interested in seeing the two cards used here alongside eachother in a regular dual PCIE slotted board running GenL's Physx mod.
I'm not trying to stir anything up with that, I just find this sort of stuff terribly interesting and geeky. Tech porn, if you will.
That's the way that the hardware world is. Sometimes to get the first look at things you get it before it's really buyable. So in a couple of weeks it should be much clearer what the street value is.
"I know VB likes the colour scheme and is very enthusiastic about it but seriously, come on, £250?" - I did say the "rumours are" matey. Not that it's a guaranteed price.
I would say a fair price for this board here in the review would be £200, but then I have no idea what they are paying Lucid for these chips it uses or how much they cost to produce.. One thing I didn't say was fair play to MSI for actually trying to be different. I have been very impressed recently with Afterburner which IMO is the best piece of software ever for taking your cards by the scruff of the neck and getting them to behave.
I know it's only really a GUI for Rivatuner but that doesn't detract a single thing from it IMO. Utterly awesome tool.
That should bring it up to a 10 for price
That should bring it up to a 10 for price
Except they have none in stock and the previous Fuzion model is still £211.
I'd be very surprised if they actually retail it at £150 once they've got some in stock. If so it's completely a no-brainer.
Bargain. I'm gonna ask for one for my 21st I think. I cba to go back to the review but did it say if you have an ATi card that running it with the lucid+hydra setup you can get phys x from the chip?
Even for a full sized board that supports SLI and crossfire (and hybrid with the right drivers) it's a good board but I don't think I would buy it purely for Lucid.
Just my opinion of course and I am probably wrong as usual
Edit. I was wrong I think. According to Scan it doesn't support SLI. S'a bit odd isn't it?
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