MSI B85M Gaming Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts about the MSI B85M Gaming Motherboard

Ask in almost any tech forum for advice on a gaming system build and you will most likely hear the same refrain: “Get at least an unlocked i5 to avoid bottleneck”. This is a statement operating on a false assumption borne of many factors. Many users are eager to recommend but reluctant to be specific and to be budget conscious in this regard because they are hedging their bets. Any recommendation you will get online from anonymous users will be the safest recommendation in their mind and it will not be always the most ideal , for budgetary or even for optimal un-“bottlenecking” gaming performance. It is even more tragic when you see experienced users, reviewers, and unboxers, sales-people recommend the same thing, as if the solution to everything is to up-sell. The truth is, you get plenty of mileage from an Intel “Haswell” Core-i3 and do not need “overclocking” to justify its value on a gaming platform. Most of the reasons modern games bottleneck is because game developers cannot get their heads out of their asses and optimize their games properly for the PC. Is there a reason GTAIV should run horribly on high-end PC 2-years after its release when a technologically simpler system could run it? It was not until a few months ago that PC game developers have begun talking publicly about bringing console-level efficiency to the PC, and to be honest, it is about bloody time.

For those of limited budget, the MSI B85M Gaming motherboard paired with a Haswell i3 or even an Intel Pentium G3220 saves a lot of money which is better spent on getting a powerful discrete graphics card and an SSD. You do not need to overclock and can play many of the latest games comfortably. You don’t have to take my word for it, here are reviews from Hexus and Legit Reviews verifying my claims. One thing I will lament however is the limitation to dual-channel 1600MHz DDR3, since Haswell gaming performance scales very well with memory frequency.

On the MSI B85M Gaming platform, users do not need to compromise on audio or Ethernet speed either as the MSI Audio Boost implementation and the Killer Ethernet performance are objectively impressive as evident in the benchmarks. OC Genie is more of a remnant of the old pre-microcode era and is not useful on the B85M Gaming but there are other features such as USB Audio power (stable 5V signal in rear USB 3.0 ports) and USB super charger that are very handy for general usage. Although Command Center does not provide overclocking either, it is also convenient for controlling fans from the desktop and enabling MSI’s RAMDisk feature. For $85, the MSI B85-Gaming delivers a lot on a small package. Limitations imposed by Intel aside, MSI’s bundled software and hardware add-ons provide incredible value that make it a solid choice as a budget build choice platform, earning it the Modders-Inc Must Have award.