MSI 770-G45 Value Gaming AM3 Phenom Crossfire Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,390 words · ~6 min read
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so today i'll be doing an unboxing of a product that i've been meaning to have a
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look at for quite a while this is the MSI 770 g45 so it's part of their g
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series or their gaming series you can see they got a big red g here that's
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what that means and it has a couple of features that are pretty good first of
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all it has full support for AMD's phenom 2x4 and it also has full compatibility
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with Windows 7. it has their green eup technology included you know what i'm
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actually going to have a quick sort of zoom in here so that you can actually
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see what i'm talking about here now this board also like most of the 700 series
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chipset boards from MSI has support for the brand new phantom 2 x6s although
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that's not marked on the box you just need to make sure you update the BIOS
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with your board before you will get support for that so down here you can
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see it's am3 CPU ready which we've already been through comes with some
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kind of norton software supports lossless 24-bit audio it has their easy
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oc switch which while it's not quite as nice as their oc genie it's still a
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pretty useful little thing it's got active phase switching which gives you
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power savings so that means that while this motherboard has a certain number of
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phases to provide to the power under peak load it can actually reduce how
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many power phases it's using at idle to make sure that you're using less power
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at idle because fewer power phases means less wasted power also it features MSI's
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unlock CPU core technology stable unlock
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so like so many AMD boards these days there is support for unlocking the extra
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cores in AMD's x2 and x3 cpus that are
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artificially reduced for sale so here on
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the back we've got mostly the same stuff the active
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facebook all solid capacitors so that's a big one that they've actually got on
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the back here and i'm going to just sort of zoom in again here and it also has
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support for m flash this is a feature that was missing from MSI boards for a
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long time and now we're finding it almost across
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the board allows you to flash the BIOS without a floppy drive or uh or using
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you know bootable usb drives or anything like that you just throw a
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usb drive on the back of the motherboard and then you boot up to the m-flash
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utility and you can flash the BIOS just like that inside the motherboard box we
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will find a variety of things as per the usual arrangement so let's see what we
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have first of all we have the io shield
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okay color coded for your convenience next we have the drivers and utilities
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dvd do not use that download the latest off the MSI website
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then we have a quick installation guide and there doesn't appear to be anything
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particularly quick about it it's quite large oh that's not too bad actually
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here let me just unzoom a little bit so you can see how big this guy is i'm
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going to turn off my mother or my monitor so you don't have to contend
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with that at the back for focusing so it shows you how to install the CPU RAM
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drives graphics card around to the other side front panel
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headers uh the power setting up the BIOS installing the os
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and installing the drivers and utilities very nice kind of walks you through the
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whole process i mean really building a computer is not that hard these days the
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manufacturers cats in the garbage bin make it so easy
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for us okay here we have the user guide
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this is the europe version that's interesting check that out
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europe version very nice they're in the garbage again
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sorry bear with me here get over there okay garbage can has been relocated
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right there okay so inside the user's guide we will
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find many different languages so the actual english portion is only about oh well
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it's not that thick it's only about this much english
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english english and then it goes on to deutsch just like
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that okay so next we've got one ide cable uh one SATA cable and then one
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molex to SATA adapter that is a fairly
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bare accessory package as far as cables go but if you're anything like me you've
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probably got about 50 SATA cables lying around
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anyway and here we go let's just get this
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motherboard opened up here and we will have a look
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all right so layout layout is a pretty standard sort of fair you've got all of
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your so far i noticed that the power adapter or the power connectors are in
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their ideal location so your four pin power is up at the top left of the board
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exactly where it belongs and then you've got
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your am3 socket so i'm just going to pull this sticker off so you can have a
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better look at the am3 socket along with the am3 socket you will also get support
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for dual channel ddr3 just like all of
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the cpus that run on the am3 socket will require then along to this side of the
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board we've got our 24 pin connector exactly where it belongs we've got a
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fairly beefy looking heatsink on the northbridge chipset okay then moving
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down we have an ide port okay so that's a side mounted one for easy access and
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then we have kind of a strange arrangement of the SATA ports so here
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we've got four right angle SATA ports and then two normal
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facing right out of the board SATA ports so that's a kind of a strange strange
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decision but i think i see why they made it because these two or rather these four
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connectors could potentially be interfered with by a full-length graphics card whereas this one is not
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nearly as bad down here we've got
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we've got three usb headers and then we've got our front panel connectors
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over here we can see the overall layout of the board is quite desirable so we
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have one pci express 1x connector up at the top then we have
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two pci express 16x and three pci so if
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you actually install two dual width pci
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express video cards you'll be left with one pci 1x and then two
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or rather one pci slot so that's pretty much your optimal configuration there
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and then we've got the easy oc switch so it actually comes with instructions
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written right on the board which is pretty nice so here i'm just going to
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zoom in even more there and try and position this so you can see what i'm
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talking about so the easy oc switch has instructions right here so it says
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default is on one and two and then ten percent is one
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up two down fifteen percent is one down two up and then twenty percent overclock
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is flipping both of these switches down now let's have a look at the io
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connectivity on the back so we've got two ps2 ports and this is an odd one
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we've got a serial port so i guess this motherboard could potentially be used
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for industrial applications because so many peripherals that are used in sort
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of industries that aren't quite as up to speed as the technology industry so
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something like uh you know mining or
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many many different industrial applications will still need a serial
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port we have six usb 2.0 ports no usb
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3.0 support on this board it's a relatively value minded board then we
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have a gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1 audio support so thank you for checking
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out my unboxing of the MSI 770 g45