The Granite Bay for Overclockers

The first MSI GNB Max-FISR was in its own, a rather feature packed motherboard based on the latest Intel E7205 (Granite Bay) chipset. It came with all the usual stuff, ranging from FireWire to Gigabit Ethernet LAN. However, one of the biggest letdown with the MSI GNB Max-FISR was the lack of proper overclocking tweaks. Without any proper options for voltage control, the GNB Max-FISR was not any power user's choice as it did not offer enough frills like others from ASUS or Gigabyte.

That didn't stop MSI from claiming back the market share as they soon went back to the drawing board for a more feature-rich board based on the Granite Bay chipset. Now, you should know that the Granite Bay was meant to target enterprise/workstation systems and were never meant to be popularized for the consumer market. This was one reason why MSI designed the GNB Max without any overclocking features as they had initially wanted to target that market (at least that was what I was told). But soon after the release of the GNB Max did MSI realize that it was the consumers who wanted a feature-rich board with plenty of overclocking options. It was too late for them to do anything to the GNB Max's design but to redesign the board with features targeted at overclockers.

Well, it didn't take them long to redesign the board and they managed to surprise us with the GNB Max2-L that comes with very good overclocking features. Not only that, this is one of the Granite Bay boards that's based on a four-layer PCB design, while the rest, like ASUS and Gigabyte used a six-layer PCB. The cost of producing boards using six-layer PCBs are high and it is obvious why most Granite Bay motherboards are higher than boards based on 845GE or 845PE chipsets.