MSI B85M Gaming Motherboard Review

To build a good gaming system you need two basic things, Good Video and Good Audio.  When used together they can create a totally immersive gaming experience that is almost equal across any gaming platform.  A slight concession is building a good gaming system without spending a bunch of money.  You will need to accept some sacrifices along the way and the MSI B85M Gaming is a motherboard that can help you do that.

The modern PC landscape has changed over the past several years from leaps in innovation to specialized versions designed to do a single task extremely well.  You can see this in the video card market when looking custom card designs against the reference based.  The custom cards will deliver more performance and often have specialized hardware to allow further tweaking.  The same can be seen in the motherboard world.  Motherboards like the B85M Gaming appeal to a type of system builder who likes the idea of having better components but cannot always afford top of the line hardware.  As a result you get a motherboard setup for gaming and the ability to increase performance with more powerful addons.

You won’t find an overclocking section in this review because, the motherboard wouldn’t do it.  There are a few overclocking options in the UEFI that will allow you to tweak memory performance from setting the XMP profiles to loading custom profiles based on specific memory modules.  If you have a K-series processor you can change multipliers but, only up to the turbo limit. 

Performance considerations should also take into account the cost of the motherboard.  For instance it doesn’t make much sense to use a Core i7 4770K on this motherboard given the lack of overclocking controls.  Instead a processor in the Core i5 or Core i3 range would be a better option thus allowing you more money for the video card budget. 

Overall we really enjoyed this motherboard.  Sure, it isn’t a high-end overclocker designed for long nights under LN2 but it does come with a Killer Networks gigabit controller and MSI Audio Boost.  Both are nice additions for any gaming system along with two 16x PCI Express slots for AMD Crossfire. 

AMD Crossfire on MicroATX
Improved UEFI Support
Excellent Color Scheme
Killer Networks Controller

B-series chipset means no overclocking
Would have liked creative audio