Another small but very important detail is that MSI added a PLX PEX8608 PCI Express switch chip on this motherboard, which adds eight more PCI Express lanes to it. The presence of this chip allows you to run two high-end video cards, SATA-600 hard disk drives and USB 3.0 devices at the same time without any drop in performance. On motherboards without a chip like this performance may drop under this circumstance, as the chipset doesnt have enough PCI Express lanes to connect all these devices at the same time at their full speed. P55-GD80 doesnt have this chip, but this isnt a problem, since this other board does not have SATA-600 and USB 3.0 ports.
