Inside the box there’s a user’s manual, an overclocking guide manual, an IDE cable, a SATA cable, a DVD driver disc, a 4-pin molex to SATA power cable and an I/O rear panel shield.
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
The 785GM-E65 is a Micro-ATX form factor motherboard with dimensions of 24.4 by 24.4cm. It is packed with solid capacitors for longer life, stability and improved overclocking potential.
The AM3 socket supports AMD’s Phenom II range of processors including its high performance 140w CPUs. The MOSFETs have a heatsink that is directly linked to the NB heatsink by a single heatpipe, the Northbridge chipset used is the AMD 785G that includes the ATI HD4200 DirectX 10.1 IGP. The HD4200’s core is a 55nm processor that is clocked at 500MHz; the IGP also has a dedicated ELPIDA J11168A5E 1Gbit DDR3 memory chipset that runs at 1333MHz next to it.
There are 4 DIMMS that can hold DDR3 800/1066/1333 MHz RAM up to a total of 16GB.
The AMD SB710 runs 5 SATA ports including an eSATA that is located on I/O rear panel, it also supports one IDE port that can connect up to 2 IDE devices. Next to these is the front panel connecters and 3x USB connectors with support for up to 6 USB ports.
The board holds one PCIe x1 slot, one PCIe x16 slot and two standard PCI slots. Take note in the picture that above the first PCIe slot there is a small red switch; that switch is there to help end-users to increase the CPU FSB directly to reach higher performance and skip any complicated overclocking settings in the BIOS.
The rear panel of the motherboard from the left to right includes an optical SPDIF-out port, a PS2 keyboard/mouse port, VGA and DVI ports, 6x USB’s, an HDMI port, an eSATA port, an RJ45 port and 6x audio jacks.
The REALTEK RTL8111DL on board network chipset supports 10/100/1000Mb/s network configurations while the REALTEK ALC889 HAD chipset is used for onboard audio and it supports true blu-ray audio .
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
The following pictures describe the BIOS features and details
Test Setup
| CPU |
AMD Phenom II 955 |
| Heatsink |
ASUS Triton 81 |
| Motherboard |
MSI 785GM-E65 |
| Graphics Card |
ASUS ENGTX 280 |
| RAM |
2 x 1GB Corsair DDR3-1333 7-7-7-21 |
| PSU |
Corsair HX1000W |
| HDD |
Seagate 80GB |
| Monitor |
BENQ G2400W LCD |
| Sound Card |
ASUS Xonar Essence |
| O/S |
Windows Vista Ultimate SP2 |
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
–~~~~~~~~~~~~–
Conclusion
MSI 785GM-E65 motherboard features are great for a Micro-ATX board, from supporting 140w CPUs to solid capacitors which for more overall stability under normal and overclocked conditions. This makes upgrading the processor later on much easier. It also has hybrid crossfire support with the onboard ATi HD 4200 IGP that supports DirectX 10.1 and comes with its own dedicated 1Gbit DDR3 1333 memory and it can run Blu-RAY movies through the HDMI port. By adding an additional dedicated ATI card it can become a pretty decent gaming machine for someone who is on a tight budget.
Performance wise the motherboard performed perfectly compared to other motherboards in the comparison list, it did a great job in the gaming benchmarks and a decent job with daily applications. The BIOS features and configuration are very good and are adjustable which is not always the case with cheaper boards.
Views: 4519 
