I originally planed to do up a review of the MSI P67S-C43 (B3) Socket 1155 Motherboard as I ended up purchasing one as part of my Sandy Bridge upgrade and there didn’t appear to be any reviews of this particular model.
On paper, it sounded like a fantastic deal and at the time it was $20 less than the next cheapest P67 board.
I took dozens of pictures while putting it together and was fairly impressed by the design and layout…….
Sadly, the board was defective. 🙁
Initially, I couldn’t even get it to boot with my Patriot 4GB DDR3-1600 DIMMs. It would power up for 6 seconds and then reboot (continuously). Assuming it didn’t like the memory timing, I swapped in a 1GB DDR3-1066 DIMM. Even with my 1GB DIMM, it would only boot with the memory in slots 3 and/or 4.
With a 1GB DIMM in place, I booted to the UEFI BIOS (which is pretty amazing) and launched the built in BIOS update utility (Live Update). It would have been pretty awesome to upgrade the BIOS from within the BIOS over the Internet but it didn’t work. Live Update was able to pull down the BIOS file, but would hang while verifying. I ended up having to download the BIOS update using a different computer and boot from a USB stick to preform the update.
After updating the BIOS I was able to use my DDR3-1600 memory, but only in slots 3 and/or 4. It seemed that no matter what combination I tried, it would not boot with anything in slots 1 or 2. Newegg would have gladly exchanged it for me, but the experience gave me a bad impression so I went with a refund and picked up an ASUS P8Z68-V instead. Maybe next time MSI.
ComputerAbuser
Asus (Cough)
What, no love for ASUS? 😀