Introduction

MSI, also known as Microstar International to some, has been around for a long time. In fact, they were one of the first companies to have a working Athlon motherboard back in the heady days of AMD and the Slot A CPU. Unfortunately somewhere between then and now MSI sort of dropped off the radar. We had the chance to talk with them at CES and they told us that they had some big plans moving forward (Including their Big Bang line-up).

But MSI let us know that they were not just going to push out top end (and expensive) products; one of their goals was to bring enthusiast class features to their entire product range. These are things like OC Genie, HDD backup and XHD (Auto build RAID 0). We have had their H55 Express based motherboard, the H55M-ED55, in the lab and can tell you just how well these features work on this entry level board.