so today I'll be doing a quick motherboard unboxing this is from MSI's
gaming line of motherboards you can tell because it has a big red G on it wow I
actually just realized as I was saying that that this is a g I knew about the
color coding but I had no see look it's the same stylized G for gaming Series
this is a microatx motherboard built on AMD's 890 GX chipset so it uses one of
the latest chipsets from AMD it is a g g65 suffix so the m means microatx g65
denotes fairly high end probably about as high end as you're going to go on MX
okay we've got a few logos on the front so why don't we have a look here it's HDMI so it has HDMI out excellent thank
you it has security by Norton okay eup
MSI ready some kind of green thing based on that it's a tree then we have Auto
overclocking OC Genie this is actually a pretty cool feature I had this um I
covered this in my core i5 overclocking guide then uh we have SATA 6 GB per
second or SATA 3 as well as USB 3.0
let's go around to the back it has a heat pipe and it supports lossless audio
okay let's open this thing up so accessories MSI does a pretty good job
as far as their accessory packages go but this is a microatx board so you
expect to find a little bit less first we've got an IO Shield so we can already
see basically what we're going to have on the back of the board but I'm not going to give away any surprises now
then we have a drivers and utilities DVD um don't use it download the latest off
the MSI website the quick installation guide is about 3T wide and shows us all
of the basics so they show us CPU RAM
Drive graphics card front panel headers
power BIOS OS and Driver installation so
you could in theory oh cameraman's trying to look at this for some reason
there you go okay you could in theory set up your computer with this quick
start guide so thank you MSI for that and then if that guide is not enough for
you then there is a full users guide which is thick and uh let's see French
what else we got here uh German
and oh wow I don't know Russian I think
although I'm not I'm not sure and also English at the beginning so it's a
fairly thin manual actually there's not a whole lot to it okay great next we
have IDE one Molex TOA adapter and one
SATA cable this yeah yeah you're probably going to want more than one
SATA cable with a high-end board like this I would have liked to see a couple
more included but the reality of it is SATA cables don't cost a whole lot and
if you're anything like me you've probably got a couple hundred of them lying around anyway
so given that you don't need any kind of special SATA cable for SATA 6 gbit per
second I think it doesn't make much of a difference how many they include okay
next we have the board itself so first of all we have the power power saving so
APS active phase switching so the unique power saving design for anyos basically
what they're doing is they're switching how many phases of power the CPU uses
depending on the load of the system and it will actually use less power overall
that way than if say they had a 16 phase CPU power delivery design if you
actually run all 16 phases at all times it is going to hurt your power
consumption although it'll be delivering very clean power so when you're
delivering less power you can actually turn off some of the phases okay so here
what we start in the middle of the board where all the action is this is an am3
socket so you have support for all the latest AMD quad cores and since this is
an 890 GX I would fully expect there to be support for the upcoming AMD 6 core
CPUs next we've got a four pin power connector up at the top left so you can
tell that they're not expecting to deliver a whole ton of power to the CPU
so you're not going to be doing any extreme like liquid nitrogen overclocking on this board but it's
going to be more than adequate obviously for even the highest TDP CPUs from AMD
which is 140 watt speaking of which this is cooling your voltage regulation
modules and then you got one small heat pipe going down to the chipset so that's
your 890 GX chipset and then down here is your Southbridge which is
running I did it again five SATA 6 gabit
per second ports so something to note about this AMD board versus any Intel
board out there right now is that you've got six SATA 6 GB per second ports
including your EA port on the back and that is more than you'd see on almost
any Intel board because they're actually running off the AMD chipset rather than
running off a thirdparty chipset added by the motherboard manufacturer so
that's pretty cool you've only got five here so the sixth one is actually on the
back panel uh DDR3 so we have support for dual Channel DDR3 and they're
colorcoded so you would install the modules side by side so if you have two
modules you'd put them both in the blue and then both in the black your 24 pin
connectors and it's ideal location along the right hand edge of the board and
let's see what else we've got here for regular rather regular for interesting
features easy OC switch let me see what
kind of a switch they've implemented I have never seen this particular switch
before so I would love to comment on how it works but um I actually don't know
the OC Genie switch I've seen before is just a push button but um yeah no it
looks like they've implemented a slightly different system this time around so yeah you switch it back and
forth like that oh I hope I can put those back yeah there we go okay so you
got USB headers four so you could hook up like four front USB port card reader
some other thing oh here we go hey hey hey here's the manual easy OC switch
it's right there on the motherboard so default is both up so for a 10%
overclock you push down switch number two for a 15% overclock you push down uh
switch number one and then for a 20%
overclock you push down both switches there you go that's your easy OC switch
so let's put those back to no overclock okay expansion cards so you can put in
two PCI Express 16x graphics cards one
PCI Express 1X and one PCI now I would
have liked to see these two switched around
because if you're buying a relatively high-end although microatx and thereby
lower-end board uh you'd probably want to be using a dual slot video card and
if you're doing that then you'd probably want to have an additional PCI e slot
that said what they have done with this particular layout is they've given you a
way to install One graphics card one PCI
E other card so if you're not using two graphics cards and then one PCI so it
seems like kind of a flexible layout and there's always compromises that you have
to make on a microatx board as far as expansion slots are concerned because
there's only four let's have a look at the back of the board so we've got one
of those mouse keyboard PS2 combo ports we have optical audio out then we have
DV VGA and HDMI then we have four USB
2.0 ports one HDMI one e sat running at
6 GB per second then we have two USB 3.0
ports those are running at about 10 times the speed of the USB 2.0 ports 1
GB Ethernet and then 7.1 onboard analog
audio thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890 gxm g65 from MSI