Verdict: A cheap board with PCI-E 2.0 support to give your AM2 CPU a new lease of life.
AMD has just released a slew of new products to wrest your attention away from Intel and Nvidia - you'll find reviews of the quad-core Phenom CPUs on p77, and the new ATI Radeon graphics cards on p51-55. The element that connects these components is a new range of chipsets - the AMD 7-series, which has PCI-E 2.0 support and the dual-voltage planes for the new Phenom CPUs. There are three flavours of the 7-series, which are differentiated by their enthusiasm for the two headline features of the new chipsets: CrossFireX and OverDrive.
CrossFireX allows you to use one, two, three or four Radeon HD 3-series graphics cards together. This is only present on the 790FX chipset, which the Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 uses. In contrast, this MSI motherboard sports the cheaper 790X chipset and supports a maximum of two graphics cards, providing each with eight PCI-E 2.0 lanes. This is fine if you have Radeon HD 3000-series cards, as their PCI-E 2.0 support means that they'll receive the same 8GB/sec bandwidth of a 16-lane PCI-E 1.1 slot. However, PCI-E 1.1 graphics cards will each receive only 4GB/sec of bandwidth if they run together in CrossFire on a 790X motherboard. Fit just one card, and a790X board can supply it with 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes.
OverDrive is (or at least, should be) available on this motherboard. This is a new software overclocking tool that will be provided with every 7-series motherboard, and it can read and write values from and to the board's BIOS. This should make it a powerful tool, as it dispenses with the need to mess around in ugly BIOSes, and their poor explanations as to what the settings do, such as 'this option turns FVR SpeedBooster on' or other similarly unhelpful advice.
However, OverDrive doesn't provide the same level of control on every motherboard. Owners of 790X boards will see fewer options than 790FX board users, while owners of motherboards based on the budget 770 chipset will see even less. However, OverDrive refused to run on the MSI, just as it failed on the Gigabyte. Clearly, the tool still needs a lot of work.
Aside from the differences in the chipset used by this £62 board and Gigabyte's £155 board, there are other reasons for the considerable price difference between this issue's two Socket AM2+ motherboards.
For starters, the MSI box has barely anything inside it. While Gigabyte has crammed in all sorts of extras - some of which are handy, while others are superfluous - MSI provides only EIDE and S-ATA cables, and a Molex-to-S-ATA power converter, plus a manual, driver CD and I/O shield. We reckon that someone's been watching too many 'Scrooge' films. In fairness, though, most people won't need several dozen S-ATA cables.
The frill cutting doesn't end with the bundled extras though - MSI has shaved roughly an inch off the width of the board. Usually, an ATX motherboard is 245mm wide, but the MSI is only 220mm wide. It means that it misses the usual second set of mounting holes, making shoving RAM into the DIMM sockets a little worrying, as the PCB bends out of shape. Fortunately, however, little else of importance has been left out. There are still four DIMM sockets, plus four S-ATA II ports - all of which can be used even if you fit two chunky dual-slot graphics cards - and there's also an EIDE port mounted parallel to the board.
While the basics of the board are adequately covered, MSI has skimped on the extras. There's a gap on the board for a VIA FireWire controller, and there's no eSATA on the rear I/O block. There are also no S/PDIF outputs of any kind.
Some cost cutting is to be expected, though, and at least MSI has cut out relatively superfluous features. FireWire has never made much impact on the PC (nowhere near as much as it has on Apple hardware anyway), and we'd be surprised at many bemoaning the lack of eSATA. Meanwhile, anyone who cares about audio quality to the extent that they need S/PDIF will probably have a dedicated sound card, and avoid the on-board Realtek HD Audio altogether. The I/O block has four USB 2 ports and Gigabit Ethernet, while three more USB 2 headers are lined up along the lower edge of the board.
The sensible decisions concerning cost cutting are reinforced by sensible decisions regarding the board layout. Value motherboards usually have their ATX12V power socket placed centrally, as this makes routeing the power traces to the CPU socket during the design process easier, and therefore cheaper. However, this means that the power cable will snake around your CPU cooler, impeding airflow and reducing cooling efficiency. On the MSI, however, the 4-pin power connector is placed towards the edge of the PCB for neat cable routeing.
Slot layout is good too, with a decent amount of space between the two high-speed PCI-E slots. MSI has also recognised that there's a lack of decent single-slot graphics cards (only the ATI Radeon HD 3850, p55, and Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT are worth buying at the moment), and has saved even more cash by placing only one connector in the gap between the two graphics slots. It's a 1x PCI-E slot, and practically useless, so it's no great loss if obscured. The second high-speed slot is usable with 1x, 4x or 8x PCI-E cards, and there are also two PCI slots.
Performance
It's slightly heartwarming to play with lever-arch sockets and pinned processors again. Once our Phenom 9600 test CPU was in place, and we'd blown off the dust collecting on our Arctic Cooling Freezer 64, we hit the power switch. And then watched as the fans whirred, and the screen refused to light up.
The MSI arrived early, and didn't seem to know what a Phenom was. We replaced the Phenom with a Socket AM2 Athlon 64 X2 to allow us to install Vista Ultimate 32-bit, the SB600 driver and to then flash the BIOS to the .110 revision (the latest at time of testing). After this, we replaced the Phenom and breathed a sigh of relief.
Stock scores from the quad-core Phenom 9600 were disappointing, with only the CPU-intensive multithreaded Handbrake video encoding test breaking through the 1,000 points barrier set by our reference PC and its dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo E6750. However, the poor results in the other two tests dragged back the Overall score to well under the 1,000-point mark. The multitasking score was especially dire at 694 - this is the sort of performance we'd expect from a dual-core laptop rather than a quad-core desktop PC.
The system we made from the Gigabyte board and our Phenom 9600 was poor value compared with the reference PC - it was almost £100 more expensive to build and far slower. The lower price of this MSI at least offers system price parity with the reference PC. An Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 costs £113, while the Asus P5K Premium adds another £120. The Phenom 9600 costs £174 and this board is priced at £62.
Several options in the .110 BIOS were greyed out. All the voltage options were locked, preventing us from putting the usual 2.1V through our standard Corsair DDR2 test RAM, so they had to be run at 800MHz rather than the 1,066MHz of which they're capable. It also meant that we couldn't push the FSB far before the Phenom 9600 flaked out. The MSI couldn't even manage the poxy 20MHz HTT overclock that the Gigabyte handled. This means that this lack of overclockability is the fault of the motherboard. We managed to push the HTT to just 213MHz in the end, resulting in a very minor speed increase. The CPU multiplier is also locked at 11.5, so we couldn't drop this to double-check the maximum HTT.
Conclusion
Given the lack of performance from quad-core Phenoms compared with even dual-core Core 2 Duos (let alone the Core 2 Quad E6600, which is cheaper and faster than the Phenom 9600), you'd have to be an AMD fanboy of epic proportions to build a system using a Phenom. Price-to-performance ratios aside, you could end up with a motherboard that doesn't recognise the new CPU, and needs an Athlon 64 to power up and flash the BIOS. Still, if you have a Socket AM2 Athlon 64 X2, and fancy a motherboard upgrade to get PCI-E 2.0 support then the MSI is a better proposition than the Gigabyte, as it's far cheaper and offers similar features.
