Those who have been enjoying this hobby or have been working in this industry for some time have certainly become familiar with MSI. They’ve been in the business for quite a few years and let’s be honest. Not all their offerings over the years have been stellar. Some of them have been far from it actually. However in the last year or so MSI has really stepped up and brought their “A” game to market.
We’ve been very impressed with their more recent offerings. Personally I’ve had no reservations about recommending them to anyone. Like everyone else MSI has several offerings in various price points. The board we are looking at today is the X58 PRO-E. Think of it as a budget oriented X58 board that’s all business. It brings SLI and CrossFireX support to a more mainstream price point. The board’s packaging sports a “Gaming Series” logo on it which is a telltale sign of who they are targeting with this product.
The X58 PRO-E is sort of a “low end” X58 offering of sorts. We don’t have an endless sea of phases or as many features with marketing buzzwords attached to them as we’ve seen with other boards. Think of it as a no nonsense type of X58 board with a little of this and a little of that. Sadly we don’t have any USB 3.0 or SATA 6G support. In fact this board is pretty much run of the mill without the big expense. It is currently selling for $160 after MIR with Free Shipping. A heck of a nice price for an X58 motherboard.
Like some of MSI’s more recent budget offerings the X58 PRO-E uses a 4+1 phase power design. It is a far cry from higher end boards sporting 24 or even 32 phases. Though as I’ve said before quality beats quantity every time. Frankly I’ve seen overclocking results that are just as good or nearly as good from so called budget offerings. So don’t let the lack of phases fool you into thinking this isn’t a solid board. In power saving mode the board can actually operate on a single power phase and do so with complete stability. It uses active phase switching to keep the “wear and tear” equal on each phase. By doing this the amount of heat buildup is reduced and supposedly prolongs the life of the hardware.
Despite being a more budget oriented offering, the MSI X58 PRO-E does sport a solid feature set. It features 7 SATA ports, eSATA, IEEE1394 support, 12 USB ports, SLI and Crossfire support, 6 DIMM slots, and even legacy IDE support. Following industry trends, the MSI X58 PRO-E requires very few additional components to create a complete system. The required components are: LGA1366 CPU, DDR 3 memory, power supply, drives, and a video card. MSI integrated the following features into the design; 7 SATA 3G ports, (all but one of which is provided by the ICH10R south bridge), 1 eSATA port (via the JMB363 controller), 1 EIDE port, 12 USB 2.0 ports, 1 IEEE1394a port, 1 RJ-45 port supporting 10/100/1000 Megabit speeds, standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, six mini-stereo jacks and one optical out port.
Source:-http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/06/07/msi_x58_proe_motherboard_review
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