We beat MSI's board black and blue, benching it just for you.
We've had a look at a swathe of boards from MSI before, each of them with their own endearing quirks. From loopy Zalman heatsinks, to boards with built in waterblocks, we've seen a lot - but this has two funny features that are actually very cool (with no pun intended).
The board is based around the 790FX chipset, which is a 65nm offering that also includes 42 PCIe lanes. This means that the chipset can power quite a few PCIe 16X slots, as well as lots of onboard devices. Check out the 'Special FX' boxout for a little more on the chipset, but the most notable feature about it on this board is its location. Usually you can find the Northbridge just below the CPU socket, but here MSI has moved it to line up directly with the power regulation, and they both sit underneath one giant heatsink.
This is actually a decent design choice, as a single heatsink in the path of airflow from the CPU heatsink will give better heat dissipation, not to mention how cool the gunmetal grey looks. It's connected via a nickel-plated heatpipe to the Southbridge, a smaller affair that becomes very warm under load with no airflow - in a good case, however, this won't be a problem.
There are a row of solid caps and ferrite chokes just between the giant heatsink and the AM3 socket, but we found that there was limited space for our memory when using aftermarket coolers - only the two blue slots (one pair for a single dual channel link) could be used thanks to our TRUE's overhanging heatpipes. The usual 8- and 24-pin power connectors are also around in the most common places.
Storage options are pretty well fleshed out, and MSI has chucked six right-angled SATA ports on (as well as an extra two vertical ones), and a right-angled IDE port. For those floppy lovers, there's a port there just for you too. This board has a huge amount of buttons and a single dial - the second feature we mentioned.
There are power, reset and clear CMOS, but the Green Power button activates power saving tech (not that it's recommended for overclocking, and might cause instabilities). There's a final button here, called the 'OC DIAL' (or OC Dail as misspelt on the board proper), that when pressed allows the actual dial to be turned, increasing the HyperTransport bus in real-time, and increasing the CPU clock. This proved to be quite handy in practice, and squeezed out an extra 6MHz on top of our max OC in the BIOS. The HT bus modified with the dial isn't saved to the BIOS however, and the board won't boot with it at the artificially increased speed.
Expansion slots give four PCIe 2.0 16X slots that run at 8X electrical when three or more are used, two PCI slots and a single 1X PCIe. A POST screen is also included, though once it's booted shows nothing more than 'AA' - we'd love if it could show the CPU temp, or something useful.
Overclocking through the BIOS got us to a disappointing 261 HT bus, with a max of 267 reached in Windows when using the Dial. No amount of airflow seemed to help either, so we hope a BIOS update in the future will improve this.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012