Features
- APS
- Max FSB
- M-Flash
- All Solid Capacitors
- All Shielded Choke
- Easy OC Switch
- 1Gigabit SidePort memory
- True Blu-ray AUDIO
- M-connectors
- User Friendly
- Live Update Online
- ATI CrossfireX Technology
- Norton Security 2009
- Cool'n'Quiet
- 64-bit AMD Phenom II CPU
- Hyper Transport 3.0
- AMD 790GX
- SB750
|
|
| Part Number |
790GX-G65 |
| Manufacturer |
MSI |
| Chipset |
AMD 790GX |
| North Bridge |
790GX |
| Socket |
Socket AM2+, Socket AM3 |
| Memory speed |
1066/800/667/533 |
| Processor Types |
Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core/Athlon 64/ Sempron/Phenom/Phenom II |
| Number of CPUs |
1 |
| HT Speed |
Up to 5200MT/second |
| Memory Type |
DDR3 |
| Memory Channels |
Double |
| Maximum Memory |
16GB |
| External Graphics |
PCI Express x16 x2 |
| IGP |
ATI 790GX |
| South Bridge |
SB750 |
| Audio |
8-channel |
| IDE |
133/100/66 |
| SCSI |
None |
| SATA |
3.0 GB/s |
| RAID |
0, 1, 0+1, 5, 10 |
| LAN |
10/100/1000 4 LAN Ports |
| Firewire |
IEEE 1394a |
| USB |
USB 2.0 |
| BIOS |
AMI |
| Form Factor |
ATX |
|
|
The MSI board is based upon AMD's 790GX chipset. There are three things that this chipset has support for AM3 CPUs, DDR3 memory and integrated graphics. The Socket AM3 is a 938-pin package designed to support the latest AM3 CPUs. The memory controller is on the processor, meaning that the AM3 CPUs support DDR3 memory and this board supports it as well. Integrated HD 3300 graphics are the top of the heap in terms of performance for integrated graphics solutions.
AMD has launched several AM3 CPUs including the 810 we are using in this review, the 720 X3 and 710 X3 CPUs and more to come later this month. Due to the nature of the interface, AM3 CPUs will work on AM2+ boards, but AM2+ CPUs will not work on AM3 boards due to the missing pins and the use of DDR3 memory for system memory that is not supported by the AM2+ CPU.
APS stands for Active Phase Switching. APS uses the lower power modes of the CPU, memory and Chipset PWM when the system is not under load. Power savings of up to 27.6% are observed with APS enabled compared to a motherboard without APS. Auto Max FSB allows the overclocker to overclock quickly and automatically.
M-Flash allows the user to update the BIOS simply by using a USB drive. You can also sboot from a USB drive by using M-Flash if the BIOS crashes. MSI uses all Solid capacitors as is the custom with most motherboard manufacturers. Solid capacitors have a longer lifespan than regular capacitors and are much less likely to leak than the older capacitors. Chokes are inductors responsible for storing power and regulating current. Shielded chokes reduce core power loss and offer lower EMI emissions.
The integrated graphics core on the board is the HD 3300 from ATI. The HD 3300 has a core clock speed of 700MHz compared to the 500MHz core clock speed found on the HD 3200 on the earlier 780GX motherboard chipsets. The HD 3300 supports all features of DirectX 10.0 and in fact is a HD 2400XT modified for the motherboard with 40 SPs. MSI outfits their 790GX-G65 with 1 Gigabit for SidePort memory. SidePort memory works with your system memory to provide integrated graphics and can improve performance 15% over using the system memory alone.
Layout
ATX Form factor
CPU Socket
DIMM Sockets
Cooling clearance
The MSI 790GX-G65 is a standard ATX form factor sized board meaning that you can fit it into any ATX sized cases. MSI has decided to use their famous red colored PCB with the 790GX-G65 board. The CPU Socket is on the top of the board with plenty of room to install after-market cooling on the board. Below the CPU Socket are four DIMM slots for DDR3 memory. The motherboard can take up to 16GB of DDR3-1333MHz (1600MHz if overclocked) memory.
Expansion slots
PCI Express locks
Southbridge
PWM Heatsink
MSI outfits this board with dual PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots. Note that the top slot is x16 while the bottom slot is x8. The 790GX chipset only supports 26 PCI Express lanes meaning that when two cards are installed one will operate in x8 x8 mode. There are also two PCI Express x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots on the board for expansion. Note that the use of two dual slot video cards will block a PCI Express x1 and a PCI slot. Under the top PCI Express x16 slot is an EZ OC Switch.
SATA ports
IDE
Fan headers
USB headers
The board has five SATA ports on the bottom of the board below the first PCI Express x16 slot. Four of them are sideways facing meaning you can install or remove the cables without interference from a long video card like a GTX285 or Radeon HD 4870 x2 card. There is plenty of clearance for the fifth SATA port. The SB750 supports SATA RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 modes. The sixth SATA port is on the rear panel IO.
4-pin power
24-pin power
Trusted Power Module
Fintek Hardware monitoring chip
The 4-pin power connector is on the upper right hand corner of the board, allowing the power cable to be directly fed to the connector without going over the CPU cooler. The 24-pin power connector is on the bottom right hand corner of the board next to the IDE connector. Moving to the right we have the Front Panel Jumpers set 1 and 2. Rounding the corner of the board we have the Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons. Next to that are three USB headers.
Realtek ALC889
Realtek Clock Generator
Realtek audio driver
Front panel connectors
Onboard audio is handheld by the venerable Realtek ALC889 CODEC that has been around for a couple of years. It is fully compliant with the Azalia 1.0 specification, has true Blu-ray audio support and supports ten DAC channels for 7.1 surround sound plus 2 channels of independent stereo sound output through the front panel stereo outputs.
Gigabit LAN
Realtek RTL8111DL
FDD
Firewire
One of the big selling points of this board is the onboard video. There is a 128MB SidePort memory chip on the board to provide framebuffer memory. Up to 512MB of main memory can be allocated to the onboard graphics. Note that if you want to allocate more than 256MB I would suggest at least 2GB of memory to be used on the system. The 790GX Northbridge is covered by a heatsink with a heatpipe leading to another heatsink covering the PWM area.
Power Reset Clr CMOS
Audio headers
Choke 10
IO
The rear IO on the board consists of a PS/2 Combo keyboard/mouse port, an optical S/PDIF port, a VGA port, a DVI port, an HDMI port, six USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire port, an eSATA port, a Gigabit LAN port and the six audio jacks for the onboard audio. Note that the DVI port is a DVI-D port and cannot handle DVI-I connections as it is missing four pin holes. If you want to install a HDMI monitor a connection is included.
Bundle
- MSI 790GX-G65 motherboard
- Driver CD
- Four SATA Data cables
- Manual
- Quick Installation Guide
- Crossfire bridge
- M-Connectors
- IDE Cable
- SATA Power cable
- IO Shield
Box
Back of box
Box open
Bundle
MSI packaged the 790GX-G65 motherboard in a white box with a G on the left side of the box. The G has flames as the picture. The front of the box has a list of supported processors, the name of the motherboard, CrossfireX, AM3, Norton's Security 2009 and HDDBackup stickers. The rear of the box has a list of the features and a description of each feature in detail.
Opening the box shows the care that MSI put in bringing the packaging together. There is a cardboard tray holding the manual, the Driver CD on one side and the accessories on the other side. Below the cardboard tray is where the motherboard is located in a plastic bag. MSI went all out with the inclusion of four SATA Data cables, a set of M-Connectors, the SATA power cable.]
Driver
Utility
Service base
Norton IS 2009
The drivers for the motherboard are installed just as you would any video card. MSI uses a rebadged AT Catalyst driver install that puts their logo on the interface instead of ATI's. The driver CD also came with the Driver Booster Manager, Dual Core Center, Green Power Center, Live Update, Overclocking Center. There is also a 60-day trial version of Norton Security 2009 Adobe Reader and eSobi. Also included is a copy of HDD Backup to backup your HDD.
BIOS & Overclocking
The 790GX-GX65 comes with a modified version of the American Megatrends AMIBIOS with a few things for MSI boards. The main menu is split into Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, Integrated Peripherals, Power Management Setup, HW Monitor, Green Power, BIOS Setting Password, and Cell Menu.
The Standard CMOS feature is where the Date, Time, HDD detection, FDD and System Information is located. System information showed AMD Phenom II X4 810 Processor, the CPU Frequency, the BIOS version, the physical memory, the Cache size and L3 Cache size. Advanced BIOS Features is where the CPU Features, the Chipset Features, the Boot sequence and Trusted Computing are located.
Chipset feature is where the Onboard graphics is set. You can set the onboard graphics to UMA, SIDEPORT, UMA+SIDEPORT. The shared memory allocated to the integrat3ed graphics are Auto-512MB. UMA Location is either above or below depending on whether you need a RAMDISK. SidePort Memory Frequency can be set from 1066-1700MHz.
Memory
Cinema
Max overclock
Oveclocking Center
The Cell Menu is where the majority of tweaking of the board happens. Thhe main Cell menu is split into CPU Specifications, Memory-Z, Advance DRAM Configuration, and HT Link Control submenus. The overclocking of the CPU is done on the main Cell Menu where you can adjust the FSB, the CPU Ratio, the CPU-MB Ratio and change the voltages without accessing a submenu.
I was able to overclock the 2.6GHz Phenom II x4 810 to 2.9GHz, this is a 15% increase over the standard clock speed by using the Overclocking Center utility that MSI provides on their driver CD. The CPU cooler I was using is the reference cooler than came with the 940 CPU, meaning that with better cooling I'm sure the overclocking would have been better.
BIOS Screenshots
Test Setup & Software
AM3 motherboards cannot use AM2+ CPUs due to the pin differences between the two interfaces and the fact that the AM2+ CPU does not support DDR3 memory as the AM3 CPU does. We decided to use the fastest available Phenom II X4 AM3 CPU, the 810 in our test platform. Performance was lower than the 940 we use in the AM2+ platform, but that was to be expected with a 400MHz slower CPU.
Test System
- AMD Phenom II X4 810 CPU running at 2.6GHz
- 2GB Kingston DDR316000 2GHz memory running at 1333MHz
- 2 74GB WD Raptor SATA HDDs in RAID 0 mode
- LG 16X DVD-RW
- ATI HD 4870 1GB running Catalyst 9.4 drivers
- Cooler Master 1000W TruePower PSU
- Windows Vista 32-bit with SP1 installed
Tests
- Sysmark 2007 with patch 5 installed
- PCMark Vantage
- PCMark05
- 3DMark Vantage
- 3DMark06
- CPUBench 2003
- Crystalmark 2004
- wPrime
- Sisoft Sandra 2009 CPU Benchmark
- Hexus PiFast
- X264 Benchmark
- SpecViewPerf 10
Performance: Sandra
CPU Bench
PiFast
SYSmark 2007
PCmark 2005
3DMark
Crystalmark
WPRIME
Specview10
Conclusion
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AMD's launch of the AM3 platform is an interesting one from many angles. For the new computer owner the move to DDR3 memory is pretty clear as fewer and fewer motherboards with DDR2 memory support are hitting the market today compared to a year or two ago. DDR3 memory on the AMD platform requires AM3 CPUs. The extra memory resulted in increased performance in 3DMark Vantage and 06 over a slower AMD Phenom II X4 940 using DDR2 memory. MSI has put together a solid package in the form of the MSI 790GX-G65 motherboard, with good features, excellent bundle and very decent overclocking the MSI board is an easy choice over some of the other 790GX boards with support for DDR3.
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