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When we open the box up we find the following accessories,;quick installation guide, manual cd's with drivers, and software. Included also is a I/O backplate, two SATA cables, two SATA power converters and an IDE cable.
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If you want to run Crossfire they have also included a Crossfire bridge. The PCB is quite nice with a black and purple color scheme.
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Since this is a socket 1366 board it supports tri channel memory kits, this means there are six memory slots available. You also get six SATA ports with the board, they are placed on the bottom left of the board close to the HDD cage in your case.
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The board is not a full size board so this means you will be missing a few PCI ports, it still however offers crossfire but your older addon cards will not fit if you have more than one of them. Even with a huge cooler like the Zalman X10 Extreme the board still has quite a bit of room around the cooler.
Testing time
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This board comes equipped with a PS/2 connector for both a mouse and keyboard in case you have older products. With the board you get six USB connectors, one HDMI, one firewire, and one LAN port. You also get a high quality built in soundcard that is supposed to be able to deliver full rate audio from a Blu-Ray disc. The soundcard supports 7.1 channel playback.
Testing:
Intel Core i7 920
Corsair Tri channel kit DDR3
Patriot TorqX 64GB SSD
Asus 9800GT
Nexus NX-5000 PSU
Testing was done with the following software, Sisoft Sandra 2009, SuperPi, Winrar, Pcmark Vantage, Call of Juarez and Cinebench. We will be comparing this board vs the Asus Rampage 2 Extreme.
Sisoft Sandra 2009, Cpu Arithmetic:
So the Asus Rampage 2 Extreme is a very well performing board that cost around 300$ to get so it's quite expensive. In our first test we can see that the results are not that much different, this MSI board sells for around 165$ so almost half the price. That is something you should have in mind as we go through the test results.
Sisoft Sandra 2009, Cpu Multimedia:
In the Cpu multimedia test both processors perform very similar, they handle the multimedia functions quite well with this board.
Pcmark Vantage:
Pcmark numbers are a bit different to the Sisoft Sandra ones, the difference is bigger in our Pcmark run although the difference is not huge.
Cinebench:
In Cinebench the the MSI board is actually a bit faster although very marginal.
SuperPi 8M:
We got the exact same result in the SuperPi runs that we did on these boards.
Winrar, Unpacking 685MB:
We unpacked the file one second faster with the MSI board although it might be a coincidence.
Call of Juarez 1920*1080:
We also decided to add a game benchmark to our tests. We got very similar results in the Call of Juarez benchmark we run.
Overclocking:
We were able to boost the base click from 122 to 193BC and still have a stable setup. We got the setup to boost at 213 also but never got into windows.
To maintain the 193BC stable we boosted the Vcore with 0.2V. 193BC actually gives a 4.06GHz speed on this cpu.
Conclusion:
I think this board has proven itself quite well, for 160$ you get a very overclocker friendly board that still performs very well at stock speeds too. The Asus Rampage 2 board cost almost the double but performance is still the same as the MSI board.
I personally have not found a feature or port yet that I lack on this board even though it's a bit smaller than average. I will for sure give this board our reccomendations for superb performance and overclocking abilities.
Pros:
+ Fast
+ Overclocks well
+ Crossfire
+ 7.1 Sound
Cons:
- None this far
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