MSI B85M-P33: A Cheap Haswell Motherboard

There's sufficient spacing on the motherboard that everything should fit well without running into any obstructions with larger heatsinks, graphics cards, and other components.

The rear I/O panel ports include four USB 2.0, two USB 3.0, DVI, VGA, Gigabit Ethernet, and three audio jacks. It would have been nice to see more USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 connectivity on this motherboard, but it's limited by the chipset and MSI engineering with this being a low-cost board. The B85 is Intel's low-end "budget" business chipset and doesn't offer vPro, iSIPP, or Intel's other "business" features of the higher-end Q85 or Q87.

Prior to commissioning this system into the OpenBenchmarking.org test farm with the mid-range Intel Core i5 4670 Haswell processor, I tested it out on Ubuntu 13.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (development state) with a variety of tests. The MSI B85M-P33 was running great under Ubuntu Linux without any issues.

Those curious to see some benchmarks from the B85M-P33 can see some standalone numbers on OpenBenchmarking.org via the 1401270-PL-INTELCORE16 result file. There are also several other Linux results uploaded from this motherboard by searching MSI B85M-P33 on OpenBenchmarking.org.

Overall, if you're after a low-cost Intel Haswell motherboard that's low-priced (circa $60 USD), micro-ATX, and don't need many features (just two USB 3.0 ports, two Serial ATA 3.0 ports, etc), but most importantly is Linux-friendly and can work "out of the box" with modern versions of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, the MSI B85M-P33 is a nice candidate for the price and has been running flawlessly thus far within our test farm where it's enduring load near constantly.