so today i'll be doing an unboxing of a product that i've been meaning to have a
look at for quite a while this is the MSI 770 g45 so it's part of their g
series or their gaming series you can see they got a big red g here that's
what that means and it has a couple of features that are pretty good first of
all it has full support for AMD's phenom 2x4 and it also has full compatibility
with Windows 7. it has their green eup technology included you know what i'm
actually going to have a quick sort of zoom in here so that you can actually
see what i'm talking about here now this board also like most of the 700 series
chipset boards from MSI has support for the brand new phantom 2 x6s although
that's not marked on the box you just need to make sure you update the BIOS
with your board before you will get support for that so down here you can
see it's am3 CPU ready which we've already been through comes with some
kind of norton software supports lossless 24-bit audio it has their easy
oc switch which while it's not quite as nice as their oc genie it's still a
pretty useful little thing it's got active phase switching which gives you
power savings so that means that while this motherboard has a certain number of
phases to provide to the power under peak load it can actually reduce how
many power phases it's using at idle to make sure that you're using less power
at idle because fewer power phases means less wasted power also it features MSI's
unlock CPU core technology stable unlock
so like so many AMD boards these days there is support for unlocking the extra
cores in AMD's x2 and x3 cpus that are
artificially reduced for sale so here on
the back we've got mostly the same stuff the active
facebook all solid capacitors so that's a big one that they've actually got on
the back here and i'm going to just sort of zoom in again here and it also has
support for m flash this is a feature that was missing from MSI boards for a
long time and now we're finding it almost across
the board allows you to flash the BIOS without a floppy drive or uh or using
you know bootable usb drives or anything like that you just throw a
usb drive on the back of the motherboard and then you boot up to the m-flash
utility and you can flash the BIOS just like that inside the motherboard box we
will find a variety of things as per the usual arrangement so let's see what we
have first of all we have the io shield
okay color coded for your convenience next we have the drivers and utilities
dvd do not use that download the latest off the MSI website
then we have a quick installation guide and there doesn't appear to be anything
particularly quick about it it's quite large oh that's not too bad actually
here let me just unzoom a little bit so you can see how big this guy is i'm
going to turn off my mother or my monitor so you don't have to contend
with that at the back for focusing so it shows you how to install the CPU RAM
drives graphics card around to the other side front panel
headers uh the power setting up the BIOS installing the os
and installing the drivers and utilities very nice kind of walks you through the
whole process i mean really building a computer is not that hard these days the
manufacturers cats in the garbage bin make it so easy
for us okay here we have the user guide
this is the europe version that's interesting check that out
europe version very nice they're in the garbage again
sorry bear with me here get over there okay garbage can has been relocated
right there okay so inside the user's guide we will
find many different languages so the actual english portion is only about oh well
it's not that thick it's only about this much english
english english and then it goes on to deutsch just like
that okay so next we've got one ide cable uh one SATA cable and then one
molex to SATA adapter that is a fairly
bare accessory package as far as cables go but if you're anything like me you've
probably got about 50 SATA cables lying around
anyway and here we go let's just get this
motherboard opened up here and we will have a look
all right so layout layout is a pretty standard sort of fair you've got all of
your so far i noticed that the power adapter or the power connectors are in
their ideal location so your four pin power is up at the top left of the board
exactly where it belongs and then you've got
your am3 socket so i'm just going to pull this sticker off so you can have a
better look at the am3 socket along with the am3 socket you will also get support
for dual channel ddr3 just like all of
the cpus that run on the am3 socket will require then along to this side of the
board we've got our 24 pin connector exactly where it belongs we've got a
fairly beefy looking heatsink on the northbridge chipset okay then moving
down we have an ide port okay so that's a side mounted one for easy access and
then we have kind of a strange arrangement of the SATA ports so here
we've got four right angle SATA ports and then two normal
facing right out of the board SATA ports so that's a kind of a strange strange
decision but i think i see why they made it because these two or rather these four
connectors could potentially be interfered with by a full-length graphics card whereas this one is not
nearly as bad down here we've got
we've got three usb headers and then we've got our front panel connectors
over here we can see the overall layout of the board is quite desirable so we
have one pci express 1x connector up at the top then we have
two pci express 16x and three pci so if
you actually install two dual width pci
express video cards you'll be left with one pci 1x and then two
or rather one pci slot so that's pretty much your optimal configuration there
and then we've got the easy oc switch so it actually comes with instructions
written right on the board which is pretty nice so here i'm just going to
zoom in even more there and try and position this so you can see what i'm
talking about so the easy oc switch has instructions right here so it says
default is on one and two and then ten percent is one
up two down fifteen percent is one down two up and then twenty percent overclock
is flipping both of these switches down now let's have a look at the io
connectivity on the back so we've got two ps2 ports and this is an odd one
we've got a serial port so i guess this motherboard could potentially be used
for industrial applications because so many peripherals that are used in sort
of industries that aren't quite as up to speed as the technology industry so
something like uh you know mining or
many many different industrial applications will still need a serial
port we have six usb 2.0 ports no usb
3.0 support on this board it's a relatively value minded board then we
have a gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1 audio support so thank you for checking
out my unboxing of the MSI 770 g45