So far we’ve reviewed two 790FX based motherboards for the AMD platform: one from GIGABYTE and the other from ASUS. They were both decent performers, with the GIGABYTE board edging out the ASUS and finding a home in my AMD test rig. However all this commotion lead to an email from MSI, saying “Hey! What about our board?” Though it doesn’t really come as much of a surprise, it turns out that they have a very competitive AMD 790FX based board as well.
The MSI 790FX-GD70 offers some of the same features as the GIGABYTE (GA-MA790FXT-UD5P) and ASUS (M4A79T Deluxe) boards we previously reviewed. The catch is that it offers these features at a slightly lower price than those aforementioned motherboard manufacturers. Will this provide a good value to those loyal to or looking to jump onto the AMD platform? We’ll have to find out.
Features and Specifications
Like the two AMD based motherboards we recently reviewed, the MSI 790FX-GD70 has at its heart an AMD 790FX chipset. That means that this board supports the entire Phenom II processor line currently available on the AM3 socket. The board also supports DDR3 memory up to PC3-1066 speeds. Full CrossfireX support is also available.
Now the features we just mentioned are fairly standard faire for a motherboard nipping at the heels of the top end bracket. MSI separates itself from the rest of the pack with some of the interesting features found onboard. These features include real-time overclocking in the form of a little dial, DrMOS green power management, APS Power Saving and control, and True Blu-ray Audio. More features and specifications can be found on the product home page.
When it comes to pricing for the MSI 790FX-GD70, it tends to land on the cheaper end of the spectrum. Average retail prices for this board tend to be from a few to ten dollars cheaper than the ASUS and GIGABYTE boards we’ve previously reviewed. Seems like a great deal, but one is left wondering if you’re sacrificing performance for value. Once we take a closer look at the board, we’ll dive right into the benchmarks.
A Copious Collection of Cables and Connectors
MSI includes a complete selection of cables and connectors with the 790FX-GD70 motherboard. Most of it is standard faire, but there are a couple unique extras found here in the form of the MSI M-connectors. Similar to the ASUS Q-connector, these little blocks allow you to easily plug in your front panel, FireWire, and USB headers without having to fiddle endlessly with tiny cables. Also included are two CrossFire bridge cables, should you wish to dabble in some dual video card action. The package is rounded of by two Molex-to-SATA power adapters, SATA cables, ATX backplane, USB headers, and two ribbon cables in standard MSI red.
First We Plug in the Main Components
Like many other AMD 790FX based AM3 boards, the CPU socket on the MSI 790FX-GD70 motherboard is fairly close to the memory slots. Though the stock AMD cooler we have on hand fit just fine in the socket, some larger CPU coolers might have some issues fitting over RAM with overtly large heatsinks. Otherwise the space around the CPU socket is quite open, and you could install any number of aftermarket CPU coolers without issue.
When you take a look at the expansion slots on the MSI board, you’ll notice that you could quite nearly install four dual-slot video cards for full CrossFireX support. MSI does take advantage of all 7 expansion slots found in the ATX standard, but that last card would have its exhaust fan blocked by the rear of the case. If you’re looking to build a more modest rig, there’s definitely more than enough room for additional components that aren’t video related. Though a dual slot video card would block the only x1 PCIe slot, each of the x16 PCIe slots are backwards compatible. There’s also a couple PCI slots thrown in for flavour.
The headers on the lower edge of the motherboard a little more difficult to praise. These connectors typically have header cables from the front of a case plugged into them. The USB headers are fine, but the position of the FireWire and Front Panel Audio headers are increasingly awkward. If you still use a floppy drive, you might need to venture out and get a long floppy cable to compensate for the position of the floppy connector. It’s nowhere near the front where it should be.
While I have some issues with the headers, I found that the IDE and SATA ports were oriented in a more favourable fashion. Having the ports at a right angle instead of straight up gets cables out of the way and makes cable management that much easier. The black right angled ports are controlled by the AMD SB750 Southbridge, as is the IDE port. The SATA ports support the major RAID modes. As for the two blue ports that are sticking up from the board, they are with the eSATA ports on the back and are controlled by a JMicron JMB322 controller. This chip provides separate RAID functionality for any drives plugged into these ports.
Cool Under Pressure
To keep supporting components cool, MSI installed a rather large passive heatsink on the MOSFETs next to the CPU. They also repositioned the Northbridge chipset to be able to take advantage of the cooling properties of this heatsink. Dubbed DrMOS, this all in one system provides cooling for the power management components of the board. This is supposed to reduce heat and power spikes, making overclocking and stock operation a much smoother affair. Whether that helps remains to be seen.
Power When Needed
Getting things going on the MSI 790FX-GD70 is made fairly easy. First we have the M-connectors, which allow you to easily hook up all those annoying front panel connectors. If you don’t have those plugged in for some reason, MSI has installed a power and reset button right on the bottom of the board. They haven’t stopped there though. They also have a push button CMOS clearer, which thankfully has a guard on it to stop you from accidentally pressing it and . . . well clearing your CMOS. Those three buttons are actually becoming typical features on most high end boards.
The buttons (and dial) next to the usual suspects is where things get interesting. The Green Power button toggles the GreenPower function of this motherboard. This feature auto adjusts power phase of the components plugged into the board, to save the most power under various levels of operation. Now if you want a Corvette instead of a Prius, the next two buttons may be more your stripe. The OC Gear button and OC Drive dial work in concert to allow you to quickly and easily overclock your CPU for maximum performance. The increments of the overclock are adjustable in the BIOS. The only downside is you need to remove your case side panel to gain access to this dial.
Now there is a minor warning in the user manual for the 790FX-GD70 motherboard that states you should increase the voltage in the BIOS first before tweaking the clock speed with the dial. This is a little out of order when it comes to standard overclocking processes. However, the MSI board is made with 100% solid state capacitors. Being used to their budget oriented boards in the past, this is a nice change to see. It should allow for some stable voltage increases to give you a lot of extra overclocking headroom.
Turn the Dial to 11
Even with the OC Dial on the bottom of the MSI board, you’ll still need to visit the BIOS screen for some tweaks. That’s where you run into the Cell Menu. This is the one stop shop for almost all overclocking function on the 790FX-GD70. Now you may be content with futzing with the little dial, adjusting speed in 1MHz increments (the default, which is adjustable). I still prefer a full featured BIOS menu and the fun of tweaking everything manually. Thankfully the Cell Menu contains a large array of tweaks for processor speed and voltage, memory voltage and timings, and a few other adjustments.
As for overclocking performance, I was rather happy with what the MSI board provided. For the sake of brevity I didn’t go into heavy tweaking mode, but with our test processor (an AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU) we were able to go to 3.6GHz without any issue. This is the same speed we hit with the GIGABYTE board we reviewed, and all we had to do with the MSI board was apply a little extra voltage as with the GIGABYTE board. Your mileage may vary of course.
Plugging It All In
With everything setup, it was time to start plugging in my peripherals. The MSI 790FX-GD70 motherboard provides a fairly standard set of ports for hooking things up. There’s two discrete PS/2 ports for old school mice and keyboards, as well as a large collection of USB ports. Audio output is what you would come to expect from a 5.1 channel onboard chipset, with analogue, and optical and coaxial digital outputs present. MSI even went down an uncommon road with implementing two LAN ports, which both support GigE speeds. The increasingly common eSATA port brings up the rear.
The Test System
To test the MSI board, we installed our standard AMD test rig on it. This will allow us to make our direct comparisons to the other 790FX boards we’ve reviewed much easier. It should be noted that the 790FX-GD70 is also part of the “Dragon: Reloaded” platform.
Here are the other components used in testing:
- AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU
- Corsair XMS3 DHX 4GB DDR3-1600 Dual Channel Memory Kit
- GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B Radeon HD 4890 Video Card Review
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10000rpm SATA2 Hard Drive
- HighSpeed PC Top Deck Tech Station
- Lian Li MAXIMA Force Extreme PS-A650GB 650W Power Supply
Boards tested against:
We ran the MSI board through our collection of synthetic and real world tests to see how it measures up to the other boards. These tests include a few Futuremark programs, SiSoft Sandra, and a couple games, and are meant to directly compare performance in areas like CPU performance, memory, I/O, and gaming.
The I/O tests are fairly important, as we’ve been having some strange variances in performance from the 790FX chipset that will be covered in a separate article coming soon. For now let’s see how the 790FX-GD70 stacks up.
Sitting Down With Sandra
Our round of benchmarking started with SiSoftware Sandra. This program features a series of stress tests and benchmarks that can be used to determine if a component is functional and how well it performs. We started with some CPU tests, to see how each motherboard performs with the same hardware. For the Processor Arithmetic test the result is determined by measuring the time it takes to perform some sequences of instructions. In this test the MSI board performed is a fashion very similar with the ASUS and GIGABYTE boards. There was a minor performance burst in Dhryston testing, but nothing statistically relevant.
Much like the Arithmetic test, the Multimedia test is fairly self explanatory in it’s name. This benchmark generates a picture (640×480) of the well-known Mandelbrot fractal, using 255 iterations for each data pixel, in 32 colours. SiSoftware claims that this is more a real world test of multimedia capabilities then a sythetic benchmark. This test is supposed to place stress on and objectively rate how different algorithms (SSE3, 3DNow!, etc) affect CPU performance. The results from this test were even more dull and flat then the first CPU test we performed. Yes the MSI board did post lower scores then the other boards, but the results are so close together as to be completely moot. With no clear winner determined yet, things are looking OK for the inexpensive MSI board.
Sandra Testing Continued
Our final sythectic test of the MSI 790FX-GD70 featuring SiSoft Sandra focuses on memory bandwidth. This test uses batches of data to test the speed of memory and how much bandwidth it affords a CPU. The MSI board once again is on par with the numbers posted by the ASUS and GIGABYTE boards. Though this may seem rather redundant, this shows that the MSI board performs just as well as the other boards while still costing slightly less money.
Hard Drive I/O Remains Strange
It all started with our AMD platform showdown article. The hard drive tests we ran showed a significant drop in performance between the old and new chipsets AMD was using in its platforms. Since then we’ve been searching for a board that broke the trend. In the end this is going to result in a separate article, but for now let’s see if the MSI board can break the mould.
Since I wanted to get a general idea of hard drive performance before testing a few specific aspects, I decided to run the Hard Disk Drive test in PCMark Vantage first. The MSI board posted the lowest score of the three in hard drive I/O, though only by a decrease of 1.5%. For the most part it’s still inline with what we’ve come to expect from 790FX based boards.
Turning once again to SiSoftware Sandra, I then tested the raw performance and speed of our Kingston V-Series SSD hard drive. Since we now have the use of SSD drives to push the onboard controller, any weaknesses should be much more noticeable.
The MSI board was pretty well as fast as the GIGABYTE board used in our full time test bed, and about 3% slower then the ASUS board. These numbers still aren’t quite in the triple digits where they should be, but these are respectable transfer rates and basically the speed for most any 790FX based motherboard.
These performance numbers do seem to trend inline with the Access Time results posted by each motherboard. The MSI board came up the slowest in Access Time, though by a once again insignificant number. Overall the MSI board does look like a good value board, but we still have one more round of tests to perform.
It’s A Fake Real World
In our final test, I decided to run through to our other PCMark Vantage tests. This should make a nice summary to what we’ve seen so far, as these tests place emphasis on particular tasks instead of raw performance data. The Composite test is a rating of overall system performance, testing multimedia functions, productivity, and even some minor gaming. In this the MSI 790FX-GD70 came in last place by about 3%, which is strange considering our next tests.
We focused on the two most used benchmarks in the PCMark suite; TV and Movies, and Productivity. As one would guess, the two suites test multimedia and office based applications respectively. Here the MSI board makes up some ground, coming in the middle of the road between the ASUS and GIGABYTE boards.
I Got Game, But Does The Motherboard?
Having enough with office apps, productivity, and raw performance numbers, I figured it was time to test out some games and see how the MSI board fared under the most stressful of activities. To get things going we ran benchmarks using each of the three highest test suites in 3DMark Vantage. Here the MSI board basically performed exactly the same as all the other boards. This is most likely due to the reliance on the video card for this test. There are only CPU specific test in the entire 3DMark Vantage run. The rest places some intensive amounts of stress on the GPU.
Crysis
We wanted some real world results, so it was time to break out Crysis and see if we could break the board. Crysis is a fairly intensive game for a computer to run, with plenty of things from the GPU, CPU and RAM to do. AI processing, terrain rendering, and adaptation of the game to what you are doing are all things this title requires from a system. It’s nice to see that the MSI board pulled through, posting the highest frame rates of all three boards on 1680×1050, and posting the same numbers as our GIGABYTE board on 1920×1200. The MSI board is definitely showing its value.
World in Conflict
Distinctions became a little more clear cut for the MSI board when we turned to the RTS title World in Conflict. Since this is an RTS, there is more emphasis on processing and less on 3D. Though everything is still rendered in 3D, the amount of things going on and being done by the computer are a much larger consideration. The MSI 790FX-GD70 was the clear cut winner in these tests, if only by a couple percentage points. It still managed to post the fastest framerates across the board in our tests. So with the in mind, we better wrap this review up.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
Overall the MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 790FX-based motherboard is a good all around motherboard that presents a wonderful selection of features for a good price. The numbers posted seem to right where they should be, and the extras like overclocking work well. There are a few downsides, some minor and some not so easy to dismiss.
The most significant benefit shown by the MSI board is the price tag. The board is as good as the GIGABYTE board, and better then the ASUS board we last reviewed, in many areas. This is important as the MSI board is sometimes $10 cheaper or more then its two cousins. When you factor in the overclocking ability, this board starts to encroach on the territory occupied by the GIGABYTE board.
There are still some minor issues with performance though. At stock speeds the MSI board is slower then the GIGABYTE and ASUS boards in more then a few tests. There’s also the middling hard drive I/O performance, which on a platform that already has some questions being asked about it’s I/O performance, coming in last place isn’t a good thing. Still the gaming performance on this board isn’t anything to sneeze at. Perhaps the one saving grace of this board.
Actually no, I can’t be that acerbic about the MSI 790FX-GD70. In the end this board is a decent performer at a good price point. It doesn’t require any ridiculous processes to get it going like having to update the BIOS to make the CPU work. It just comes ready to do your bidding. It can even overclock with the best of them and quite easily thanks to the tools provided by MSI. If you need an inexpensive high end AMD Socket AM3 board to satisfy your tweaking jones, this is the board for you.
Pros
- Satisfactory performance
- Excellent overclocking ability
- Low price
- Extensive features list (including quad Crossfire)
Cons
- Only satisfactory performance
- Poor front panel connector placement
- OC Dial is neat, but needs side panel to be removed
Overall Rating: 8.5/10.0
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