So today I'm going to be unboxing MSI's shiniest motherboard box out of their
updated packaging. You can see that the 890 FXA wording lettering rather is
actually like sparkly. Very cool. Anyway, this is the 890 FXA GD70
motherboard. It is the replacement for the very popular 790 FX GD70. So the A
means that it has support for USB 3.0 as well as SATA 3 or SATA 6 Gbit per
second. You can see that down here. It still features their OC Genie easy
overclocking technology along with core unclocking and support for six core CPUs
out of the box. So that means you've got full support for AMD's Phenom 2 X6. Over
here we've got everything else. So oh yeah, this is the first time I've seen
this on their motherboards, but they've been doing this on video cards for a couple generations now. Military class.
So that means they're using uh well top components as military quality uh
whatever. So basically that means that they're using only military grade
components. So high CC cap eight times longer lifespan. They're using icy choke
20C lower temperatures and then all solid caps for 10 years ultraong
lifetime. Basically what they're going for is the best possible stability and
longevity with this motherboard. Everything there we've already covered.
It has Dr. Moss and MSI's claim and I haven't seen anything to disprove this
is that one phase of Dr. Moss is greater than or equal to four standard phases of
MOSFETs. So they switch very fast. They
are Oh, I just did it again. Uh yeah,
basically Dr. Moss is really good. That's what they say. Flat heat pipe
best radiating solution. Oh, okay. So basically it keeps the heat pipe nice
and low profile as it comes along the motherboard. Okay, let's get this opened
up. have a quick look at the accessories and then have a look at the A90 FXA
GD70. Here is our quick guide. I love these MSI quick guides. They give you a
full size, actually it looks a little bit larger than life uh model of the
motherboard and then labels everything for you to make life really easy. And
then there's a more marketing on the back. Thank you. All right. Then for
other included accessories, we have a drivers and utilities DVD. Don't install
this. Download the latest off the MSI website. Here is a little uh user guide
on their hard drive backup solution. Great. We got a quick installation guide
which is kind of like that other thing except uh more detailed. So, it shows
you how to install your CPU, RAM, drives, front panel connectors, power,
set up the BIOS, all that good stuff. Next, we have the BIOS code unlock
technology. So, a quick guide on how to use their core unlocking utility. Very
nice. Then, their control center for overclocking. Oh, here's a little user
guide for that. Very nice. All color. Look at that. All English. Wow.
Recommended CPU coolers for overclocking. Hm. Okay. These are some
interesting um Well, I hope they're going somewhere with that. I don't have
time to read it, though. Next, we've got the users guide, which is not all in
English. It contains a number of different languages and lots of details
about stuff. We have an IO shield. We
have a fairly complete accessory package overall. So, we've got four SATA cables,
two Molex to SATA adapters, one IDE cable. Then we have two USB 2.0 back
panel connectors via an uh one of those headers. Oh, here's a bit of a Oh, M
connector. I was going to say it's kind of like a Q connector, but M. Okay,
there you go. So, this has a way for you to plug in all of your front panel stuff
and then plug the whole thing in as a brick to the motherboard. Very neat.
Then we have a Crossfire bridge. So, this motherboard being a an AMD chipset
motherboard 890 FX chipset is not SLI
compatible. However, this is probably the coolest thing about this
motherboard. And so, I'm going to skip the usual stuff that I show you right
away and I'm going to show you this right off the bat. This motherboard is a
standard ATX motherboard and it supports one, two, three, four dual slot graphics
cards. So you can actually use quad Crossfirex on a standard ATX board. MSI
has pulled an engineering coup here in order to enable that. Now it's going to
run 8X 8X 8X 8X in all likelihood,
although I haven't checked, but 90 90% will, but that doesn't actually have an
impact on any of the high performance GPUs these days, including the 5870.
Very cool feature. So we've got their active phase switching technology. This
is for power saving. What it does is it actually turns off CPU power phases that
are not in use in order to get the most efficiency whether you're at idle or
load on your CPU. There's your AM3 socket supporting triple or rather
triple dual channel DDR3 memory. And it looks like MSI has taken another page
out of one of their competitors books here and they have their single side
installation for the memory module. So you just slide it in the one side and
then clip it shut on the other side. Dr. Moss. Okay. Green Power Express. Cool.
Rapid boost. Okay, we already talked about this on the back. Let me see if there's anything under this sticker of
note. And no, there isn't. Oh, yes, there is.
There is a voltage checkpoint for your RAM right in there. I don't know if the
cameraman can see that or not. He says not really, but it's in there. I assure
you it is. Okay, what else do we have? I'm going to see if I can find any other
voltage checkpoints here. And uh I'm just going to put this down on the table
so we can have a better look under the good light. Um hm. Not so much so far.
Well, I'm not going to worry too much about that for now. Why don't we have a
look at what else this board has to offer? Our eight pin connector is in its
ideal location up at the top left of the board, right next to this huge, huge,
beefy looking chipset and MOSFET cooler.
It looks like the north bridge is actually under this part. And then this
part is dedicated to cooling the MOSFETs. Here's that flat thick heat
pipe that they talked about going down to the south bridge there. And then we
have our 24 pin power connector right where it belongs. One IDE connector.
Here is a SATA 2 port running off a J Micron controller as as is this IDE port
and probably an E SATA port on the back. Then on this side we have six SATA 3 6
Gbit per second ports. So those are running off the SB850 Southbridge. Next
we have our easy button. I love these. I love these touch sensitive buttons. The
first time I saw this was on the P-55 GD80, and I'm glad that they're
continuing to do this cuz I think it's so cool. Then we have a little OC dial,
so that seems pretty self-explanatory. Plus and minus depending on how fast you
want the uh CP CPU to go. Then there's
an OC dial button. I'm guessing that enables it. And then we have their green
power button. Okay. Then we have three USB 2.0 front headers. We have FireWire,
two FireWire front headers. And then in addition to that, we have not a whole
lot else. I'm going to have one more quick scan here and see if I can find
like a a CPU voltage readout point or
anything like that. No, no, there's
nothing. Well, you know what? It might be there somewhere. If you can find it,
feel free to leave a comment on my video and let me know where it is. Let's have
a look at the back panel connectors. Oh, cameraman wants to look at that sweet uh
VRM and Northbridge cooling solution. I think that is very cool. I really like
it actually. Here, get it from this angle. Get it from this angle. See,
these are actually wavy in order to give it slightly more surface area and a
little bit better turbulence for any air flow that does happen to go through there. Very cool. Okay. Oh, yeah. I
guess the rest of the slots I didn't even talk about. There's one more PCIe1x
slot in a PCI slot. As if anyone cares. If you buy this motherboard, do me a
favor. Load it up with a bunch of graphics cards cuz that is what it is
for. Okay, let's have a look at our connectors. On the back, we got PS2
mouse and keyboard, two dedicated ports. We have a clear SIMOS button in its
very, very ideal location. Right on the back, we have optical as well as coaxial
audio out, so digital formats both. Then
we have one of those USB ESATA ports, so
six USB 2.0 ports, one ESATA. Then we
have 2 GB Ethernet, two USB 3.0, as well
as 7.1 audio out. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890 FXA GD70.