MSI DKA790GX Platinum

We give you a sneak peek at the latest board from MSI.

Amidst all the focus on Nehalem and X58, sometimes it’s easy to forget that there's another platform out there. Thankfully, MSI has given us its DKA790GX board to give us a gentle reminder.

Running the 790GX chipset, this gives the board a total of 22 PCIe lanes, that are divided up between the expansion slots. A single graphics card in the first slot will receive the full 16x speed, but with two in Crossfire they share this amount, so it drops down to 8x. The remaining six lanes are taken up with the other two sockets, as well as chips mounted on the board that provide Ethernet and storage options. Also built into this chipset is a HD3300. While this doesn’t offer amazing performance, you can run two displays off the motherboard alone, and even overclock it!

Making a welcome reappearance is a hardware overclocking switch (reminiscent of the old Pentium days). This allows an increase of 10 per cent, 15 per cent or 20 per cent in the HyperTransport Bus, without having to enter the BIOS. Voltages are controlled automatically by the BIOS, so there shouldn’t be any problem with instabilities (though we’ll check this when we review it).

Check out the gallery for more pics, and some more description.

PS: SceptreCore, I got this board before you did.
-Justin

PPS: Justin, don't gloat! -David