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MSI P45-8D Memory Lover Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S775 by massman @ 2008-10-19

Did you know that the "I" in MSI stands for "Innovation"? Well, it doesn´t, but it should be changed, because of one reason: the MSI P45-8D Memory Lover. This motherboard features 8-dimm slot memory configuration, unseen on the mainstream desktop market. Madshrimps has a look at the performances of this motherboard in both DDR2 and DDR3 test setting comparing it to three other P45 motherboards; a 4-way P45 motherboard comparison in other words.

MSI P45-8D in the spotlights

Box Lay-out

There are very few motherboard packages that are this well-designed, to be honest. Most motherboard boxes are dull and make you open it as fast as possible, but MSI decided to design the box in the spirit of this motherboard: the Memory Lover motherboard.

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Accessories

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1 x Pata HDD cable

1 x I/o back panel

1 x Molex to 2 x SATA connector

4 x SATA cable

1 x USB + IEEE1394 bracket

1 x M-Connectors

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Manual

Driver CD for Windows XP

Driver CD for Windows Vista

MSI extra's

Motherboard

The first thing that catches your eye is without doubt the massive amount of memory slots, eight in total. Surprisingly, the motherboard still has the normal size, as MSI just moved everything next to the memory a little bit to the left.

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1 x PS/2 keyboard

1 x PS/2 mouse

1 x Parallel port

1 x Serial port

1 x 6 in 1 audio jack

4 x USB 2.0 ports

1 x RJ45 LAN jack

1 x Clear CMOS button

1 x IEEE1394 port

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One PCI Express x16 slot (PCI Express Bus SPEC V2.0 compliant).

One PCI Express x1 slot. (Support PCI Express Bus specification v1.0a compliant)

Three 32-bit v2.3 master PCI bus slots.

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ATX 24-Pin power connector

4-pin ATX 12V power connector

CPU x 1/ System x 2 FAN connectors

CD-in connector

Front panel audio connector

Front panel connector

1 x chasis intrusion connector

4 x USB 2.0 connectors

1 x Floppy disk drive connector

8 x Serial ATAII connectors

1 x ATA133 connector

1 x SPDIF-Out connector

Power/Reset button

3 x HW-OverClocking switches

1 x TPM module connector (optional)

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Supports four Unbuffered DIMM of 1.8 Volt DDR2 667/800/1066 (OC) (Max: 16GB)

Supports four Unbuffered DIMM of 1.5 Volt DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600 (OC) (Max: 8GB)

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Comment from SuAside @ 2008/10/19

interesting little piece of work. too bad about the Divider issues.

you have to wonder what they were thinking by naming it the "Memory Lover", the box art used, the color for the memory slots and then the PCB itself though...

Comment from Massman @ 2008/10/20

I presume they called it 'memory lover' because of the support of two types of memory. The box art is pretty cool, especially considering the 'lover'.

The pcb color, however, is UGLY!!

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