Designer heatsinks are so in right now...
They say that beauty is only skin deep; but also not to judge a book by its cover. This motherboard (gallery here) from MSI fits under the latter saying. It's a horrendously bad brown colour, looking like it'd be more suited to a can of industrial-strength earwax than a PCB but when you start adding in the oddly coloured pinks, purples and blues everything gets confused - making this board look incredibly untasteful. Thankfully most people don't mind the look of their tech so long as it runs what they want, and does what they want, so with what most people want in mind let's have a look at the tech running inside.
Based around the ever-popular 790GX chipset, this board offers an integrated graphics processor that is roughly equivalent to a HD3300, and comes with 128MB of onboard GDDR3 to run it. It can also be overclocked through the BIOS, squeezing out a little more performance. As well as functioning as a graphics card (albeit a very underpowered one), this chipset also works as a northbridge and serves the expansion slots with all the PCIe 2.0 lanes needed for two full x16 slots, used for Crossfire. It hooks up to the SB750 southbridge chip that provides the rest of the expansion options including storage. The southbridge is cooled by a small aluminium heatsink, while the hotter northbridge is treated to a heatsink machined to have a very intricate design. This is connected via heatpipe to the power regulation's heatsink, dissipating all the heat built up by those components.
Backpanel I/O ports are reasonably well fleshed out, and contain Optical, PS/2, VGA, DVI/HDMI (only one at a time), six USB, Firewire, Hybrid eSATA/USB, Ethernet and 7.1 channel audio. The bottom edge of the mobo contains all the usual expansion options you'd expect, including a FireWire header, three USB headers and the front panel connectors. Hard power, reset and a clear CMOS button are also here which making overclocking outside a case easier (at least theoretically so). Four right-angled SATA ports are on the right edge of the board, with a single upright port used also. These are a sickly purple colour, and like most of the plastic components on this board don't look like they belong at all.
Brightly coloured IDE ports are apparently in too, though the 24-pin and 4-pin power connectors are the standard colours. We'd prefer seeing an 8-pin power connector for the CPU instead of four, as this will improve reliability when overclocking. Four DDR3 slots, colour coded with the correct channelling are present, but are also placed too close to the CPU socket for comfort, meaning that tall heatsinks will interfere with memory sticks. The AM3 socket itself has a decent amount of room around for large hunks of cooling, and fits all AM2+ coolers as it shares an identical mounting system. For those with watercooling blocks, all of the capacitors around the socket are well out of the way for fiddling with even the most awkward blocks.
Located between the two PCIe x16 slots is something that MSI has been chucking onto a lot of its motherboards of late, labelled as the EZ OC Switch. It's a pair of jumpers that go from off to on, which increase the HyperTransport bus speed depending on the combination you've got them set to - this doesn't touch the voltage so renders it kind of moot. Keep overclocking in the BIOS over this switch method. What little overclocking could be had was disappointing, hitting a max HT of only 228 - not even hitting the third OC level we do for our testing. The BIOS was well laid out, but the board simply would not perform as promised.
Check out more pictures of the MSI 790GX-G65.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012