MSI NF750-G55 Features
- Support for socket 938 AM3 CPUs including Phenom II and Athlon II series.
- Nvidia nForce 750a SLI MCP including Hybrid SLI support
- Four 240-pin DDR3 memory slots supporting 1,066 and 1,333MHz DIMMs, with DDR3 1600(O.C.) overclocking support for up to 16GB in total
- Two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot (1x16 or 2x8)
- Two PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slot
- One PCI slot
- Realtek ALC889 7.1 channel high-definition audio codec
- One Realtek RTL811CL PCI-Express Gigabit LAN
- Six SATA 3Gbps supporting RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD
- One IDE port
- Twelve USB 2.0 ports (six rear I/O, six pin-outs)
Click to enlarge
The slim box and little contents are a familiar sight with budget motherboards, but with just a single SATA cable and IDE it's slim pickings. The manual is, as usual, pretty good, and includes an install disk buried within the pages, although be wary that MSI has started pushing Norton Utilities on it - we don't want that clogging our fresh new systems, thank you.<!-- Article End --> <!-- /article body --> <!-- article navigation -->
Board Layout
Wait-a-minute... it's not red? Budget boards from MSI are usually red or pooh-brown, aren't they? Here we've got something that resembles the popular performance boards that cost twice the price. The attractive dark styling will no doubt have its praises sung by many readers.
You'll note that the chipset is a single chip solution, something Nvidia is famous for doing on its AMD boards way back since the nForce 3 era. The tiny cooler is all it needs, and remember it includes a complete DirectX 10 graphics core in addition to all the usual SATA, USB and PCI-Express lanes: that's pretty damn impressive to only require a tiny passive cooler then!
The onboard video won't win any performance prizes - it's basically a GeForce 9400/Ion with 16 shaders, and it will work in conjunction with an equally slow Nvidia graphics card for Hybrid SLI, if you really care. We don't. If anything we're treating it as a fail-safe so you still have a PC if your graphics card should fail. It's a nice to have in that respect.
The only difference between 750a and 980a is the amount of PCI-Express lanes available: in addition to the usual PCI-Express x1 peripheral connections, the 750a here can only afford a single PCI-Express x16 lane, that will split into x8s for SLI in the big blue slots. All the PCI-Express links are Gen 2 as well, for a full fat bandwidth connection.
Click to enlarge Powering the party is a 4+1 phase setup that should handle 140W CPUs, however don't expect a particularly large overhead: MSI has been known to cut it very fine. No DrMOS MOSFETs are included here, just the bog-standard old style are installed, but paired with the usual quality Nippon Chemicon capacitors and sealed chokes.
The layout really works for us actually, despite appearing a little bare on a first look. The five SATA ports are a mix between four pointing 90 degrees to the board and another poking outwards - however, that doesn't detract from using it since the graphics card fits underneath it.
The sixth and final SATA port is assigned to permanent eSATA duty giving more peripheral connections, but losing us an internal connection. With no other SATA ports available, it does limit us a little, but given the price we don't expect someone to drop £80 on a motherboard and £500 on hard drives. Having said that, with RAID 5 support available on AMD for a change (no cheap AMD boards with SB710 offer it) it does open the opportunity for a potentially cheap, AMD-based file server using RAID 5.
Click to enlarge A power-on button is all you're getting! Pff, don't expect luxurious additions such as a clear CMOS or reset button. A jumper is MSI's limit, but it still manages to include an "Easy OC Switch" that we find completely irrelevant given a quality BIOS, despite its retro appeal. Reset CMOS buttons are genuinely useful, whereas fiddly little jumper switches are not. We hope MSI puts a fork in it, because jumper-based CMOS switches should be a thing of the past.
Click to enlarge There's oodles of room to get your memory out, although naturally it's dead close to the CPU socket which makes taller DIMMs often hit heatsinks, so as always with AMD systems: be mindful of what you buy.
Despite the highest PCI-Express x1 slot looking like any card plugged in will hit the 750a heatsink, it's not actually the case - long cards can be squeezed in. With a single PCI slot, this may limit a few people looking to use old cards in an upgrade, however there are plenty of alternative PCI-Express x1s out there these days.
On the back of the board we have DVI, D-Sub and HDMI connections - the D-Sub can be used with either digital connection, but no two digital connectors can be used at once. With six USB, RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet, PS2 keyboard and mouse and six 3.5mm analogue audio jacks there's certainly more to go around than the MSI 770X-C45 board, but if you don't care for video outputs it seems a bit of a waste of space.
BIOS
MSI's BIOS is very good for overclocking support, but could still use improvements to its other features. On the CPU tweaking front there's every adjustment we need: CPU-multiplier, CPU-northbridge, Hypertransport and memory divider, as well as a clear indicator what the setting will do to the overall clock speeds: this is particularly important for the Hypertransport adjustment that changes everything.
The voltage options are very good too - actually even better in terms of mixing the CPU VDD and CPU voltage together, because the former jumps the voltage by large chunks, and the latter smaller 0.01V increments. Unfortunately you still can't type in the desired voltage: this is still where Gigabyte and Asus' BIOS' are quicker to use.
Enabling the Nvidia Core Calibration automatically unlocks extra AMD cores, which is both good from an ease of use standpoint, but crappy if you have a weak hidden core and just want to use the calibration tweak the most of what you bought. Another "confirm unlock" option would have been ideal here.
There are absolutely tons of memory tweaking settings to play with in its subdirectory, and just like more expensive boards you can tweak each channel independently even if you like. On the downsides though, recently we've found M-Flash a little flaky - across AMD and Intel boards it's bricked a few, and without a second BIOS backup that means its RMA time. Not a great record, and we now suggest avoiding using it to be safe.
The fan control is OK, but limited to just the CPU only and targeting a temperature or specific voltage value, and elsewhere while there's four profile slots to save all the BIOS settings to, none of them can be labelled to remind us what's inside. MSI has not pushed and listened to our needs where Asus and Gigabyte continually have done.
Testing Methods
With the exception of SiSoft Sandra and Lavalys Everest, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.
We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.
We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.
Test Setup:
Motherboards:
- MSI NF750-G55 (Nvidia nForce 750a MCP xx BIOS)
- MSI 770-C45 (AMD 770X/SB710 1.3 BIOS)
- Asus M4A785TD-V Evo (AMD 785G/SB710 0211 BIOS)
Common Components:
- AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition (3x2.8GHz)
- 4GB Corsair XMS3 PC12800 CL9
- Asus Radeon HD 4350 and Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP! for gaming tests
- PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
- Seagate 7200.11 1TB SATA hard drive
- Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP1
- Nvidia nForce driver 15.49
- Nvidia 190.38 WHQL
Overclocked Settings
- MSI NF750-G55 (Nvidia nForce 750a MCP): 4x3.7GHz (18.5 x 200MHz), 2.6GHz NB, 1,600MHz DDR3 at 8-8-8-24-1T
- MSI 770-C45 (AMD 770X/SB710): 3x3.5GHz (15.5 x 225MHz HT), 2.2GHz NB, 1,500MHz DDR3 at 8-8-8-24-1T,
- Asus M4A785TD-V Evo (AMD 785G/SB710): 3x3.5GHz (15.5 x 225MHz HT), 2.25GHz NB, 1,525MHz DDR3 at 8-8-8-24-1T.
Lavalys Everest 5.0.1667 Memory Performance
Website: Lavalys
Stock memory performance is considerably lower than the AMD chipset motherboards, despite the fact the memory controller is within the CPU and we're using the same hardware across the range, the BIOS has clearly not been optimised as is shown in the 300-400MB/s drop in memory performance and the 10 per cent loss of copy performance.
Overclocked, and the MSI board offered performance in line with 790FX motherboards twice the price: we achieved a 2.6GHz stable CPU-northbridge and 1,600MHz memory at its stock CAS-8 settings that yielded a considerable performance boost over the other boards.
These results are also mirrored in the latency results too: slow at stock, but nippy when overclocked.
SiSoftware Sandra Lite 2009 SP3 Home Professional
Website: Sisoftware
Sisoft Sandra's multi-threaded tests tells much the same story, but to a larger degree: very poor stock performance that turns into a huge increase when overclocked.
SATA and eSATA Performance
Website: HD Tach 3.0
We tested the SATA and eSATA performance with an Intel X25-M SSD to maximise the use of the SATA connections to show up any core differences in raw performance.
SATA performance is very good, matching that of the AMD chipset boards and maximising the performance of our Intel X25-M G1 SSD. With one of the six SATA ports assigned to permanent eSATA duty, the performance is the same.
USB 2.0 Performance
Website: HD Tach 3.0 We tested the USB performance with an Intel X25-M SSD and a SATA to USB adapter to saturate the USB bus in order to look for any performance drops.
As expected, the USB performance of the Nvidia chipset greatly excels what AMD has to offer. This has always been the case, and it's not different here.
GIMP Image Editing
Website: GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)
The poor stock memory performance has a clear effect here, slowing down the image editing by over 20 seconds compared to the competition. Overclocked, despite the extra core and memory bandwidth, the MSI NF750 only
Handbrake H.264 Encoding
Website: HandBrake
Video encoding is surprisingly fast at stock speeds, shaving a good 20 to 30 seconds off the other boards, and given the extra core the MSI board can unlock on our 720 Black Edition, it yields a very commanding advantage of about 20 per cent.
Multitasking Performance
Website: MPC-HC Website: 7-Zip
Again, multi-tasking becomes more like image editing than video encoding though as it's slow again at stock speeds and only just matching the competition when overclocked and unlocked.
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Crysis performance is not bad: minimum frame rates are competitive, but the average fps is decidedly low. The MSI 770X-C45 we previously reviewed is considerably faster here.
Stability
As usual we reset the BIOS to its default values and loaded up both the Prime 95 torture test and 3DMark 06 looping to see if the board could withstand the stress to CPU, memory and PCI-Express power draw for 24 hours. Apart from a fan to cool the CPU heatsink, there were no other fans used, meaning the heatsinks (or lack of them) have to withstand very little airflow and still keep the components cool.
We even ran the system with two Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP! in SLI, just to stress the motherboard traces, power and PCI-Express a little more. Even despite this, after a full 24 hours we came back to to find both 3DMark and Prime95 still running and the system completely responsive; an excellent result for the MSI NF750-G55.
Click to enlargeConclusion
While we don't necessary ever push multi-GPU solutions, it's nice to have multi-GPU competition in the AMD space since one chipset still doesn't fit all. The integrated graphics are a nice backup too, even if you don't use them. It's equivalent is the 785G from AMD which we also like - at a later date, the board can be retired to a HTPC for example.
While the stock performance fritters between highs and lows, the overclocking potential is very, very good for board of this price, although we did expect a more commanding lead by the NF750-G55 given the large difference in overclocks.
It looks great, it has a basic but competitive set of features and Nvidia/MSI includes the Advanced Clock Calibration now, and unlocking the extra cores is exceptionally simple to do. However, the £53 770-C45 can also keep up with it in our tests and with the latest BIOS it too can now unlock those extra cores.
We like it; it fits a niche, which is rare in this industry, but only its aesthetic design really lights a fire of desire for us. If you really want a budget SLI board and an AMD AM3 CPU, it's certainly worth the short list, but otherwise, don't go too far out of your way for it.
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