MSI 890GXM-G65 890GX DDR3 AM3 Crossfire Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,488 words · ~7 min read
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so today I'll be doing a quick motherboard unboxing this is from MSI's
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gaming line of motherboards you can tell because it has a big red G on it wow I
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actually just realized as I was saying that that this is a g I knew about the
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color coding but I had no see look it's the same stylized G for gaming Series
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this is a microatx motherboard built on AMD's 890 GX chipset so it uses one of
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the latest chipsets from AMD it is a g g65 suffix so the m means microatx g65
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denotes fairly high end probably about as high end as you're going to go on MX
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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
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you it has security by Norton okay eup
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MSI ready some kind of green thing based on that it's a tree then we have Auto
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overclocking OC Genie this is actually a pretty cool feature I had this um I
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covered this in my core i5 overclocking guide then uh we have SATA 6 GB per
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second or SATA 3 as well as USB 3.0
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let's go around to the back it has a heat pipe and it supports lossless audio
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okay let's open this thing up so accessories MSI does a pretty good job
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as far as their accessory packages go but this is a microatx board so you
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expect to find a little bit less first we've got an IO Shield so we can already
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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
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then we have a drivers and utilities DVD um don't use it download the latest off
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the MSI website the quick installation guide is about 3T wide and shows us all
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of the basics so they show us CPU RAM
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Drive graphics card front panel headers
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power BIOS OS and Driver installation so
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you could in theory oh cameraman's trying to look at this for some reason
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there you go okay you could in theory set up your computer with this quick
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start guide so thank you MSI for that and then if that guide is not enough for
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you then there is a full users guide which is thick and uh let's see French
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what else we got here uh German
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and oh wow I don't know Russian I think
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although I'm not I'm not sure and also English at the beginning so it's a
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fairly thin manual actually there's not a whole lot to it okay great next we
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have IDE one Molex TOA adapter and one
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SATA cable this yeah yeah you're probably going to want more than one
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SATA cable with a high-end board like this I would have liked to see a couple
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more included but the reality of it is SATA cables don't cost a whole lot and
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if you're anything like me you've probably got a couple hundred of them lying around anyway
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so given that you don't need any kind of special SATA cable for SATA 6 gbit per
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second I think it doesn't make much of a difference how many they include okay
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next we have the board itself so first of all we have the power power saving so
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APS active phase switching so the unique power saving design for anyos basically
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what they're doing is they're switching how many phases of power the CPU uses
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depending on the load of the system and it will actually use less power overall
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that way than if say they had a 16 phase CPU power delivery design if you
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actually run all 16 phases at all times it is going to hurt your power
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consumption although it'll be delivering very clean power so when you're
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delivering less power you can actually turn off some of the phases okay so here
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what we start in the middle of the board where all the action is this is an am3
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socket so you have support for all the latest AMD quad cores and since this is
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an 890 GX I would fully expect there to be support for the upcoming AMD 6 core
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CPUs next we've got a four pin power connector up at the top left so you can
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tell that they're not expecting to deliver a whole ton of power to the CPU
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so you're not going to be doing any extreme like liquid nitrogen overclocking on this board but it's
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going to be more than adequate obviously for even the highest TDP CPUs from AMD
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which is 140 watt speaking of which this is cooling your voltage regulation
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modules and then you got one small heat pipe going down to the chipset so that's
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your 890 GX chipset and then down here is your Southbridge which is
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running I did it again five SATA 6 gabit
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per second ports so something to note about this AMD board versus any Intel
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board out there right now is that you've got six SATA 6 GB per second ports
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including your EA port on the back and that is more than you'd see on almost
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any Intel board because they're actually running off the AMD chipset rather than
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running off a thirdparty chipset added by the motherboard manufacturer so
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that's pretty cool you've only got five here so the sixth one is actually on the
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back panel uh DDR3 so we have support for dual Channel DDR3 and they're
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colorcoded so you would install the modules side by side so if you have two
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modules you'd put them both in the blue and then both in the black your 24 pin
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connectors and it's ideal location along the right hand edge of the board and
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let's see what else we've got here for regular rather regular for interesting
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features easy OC switch let me see what
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kind of a switch they've implemented I have never seen this particular switch
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before so I would love to comment on how it works but um I actually don't know
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the OC Genie switch I've seen before is just a push button but um yeah no it
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looks like they've implemented a slightly different system this time around so yeah you switch it back and
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forth like that oh I hope I can put those back yeah there we go okay so you
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got USB headers four so you could hook up like four front USB port card reader
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some other thing oh here we go hey hey hey here's the manual easy OC switch
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it's right there on the motherboard so default is both up so for a 10%
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overclock you push down switch number two for a 15% overclock you push down uh
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switch number one and then for a 20%
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overclock you push down both switches there you go that's your easy OC switch
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so let's put those back to no overclock okay expansion cards so you can put in
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two PCI Express 16x graphics cards one
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PCI Express 1X and one PCI now I would
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have liked to see these two switched around
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because if you're buying a relatively high-end although microatx and thereby
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lower-end board uh you'd probably want to be using a dual slot video card and
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if you're doing that then you'd probably want to have an additional PCI e slot
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that said what they have done with this particular layout is they've given you a
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way to install One graphics card one PCI
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E other card so if you're not using two graphics cards and then one PCI so it
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seems like kind of a flexible layout and there's always compromises that you have
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to make on a microatx board as far as expansion slots are concerned because
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there's only four let's have a look at the back of the board so we've got one
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of those mouse keyboard PS2 combo ports we have optical audio out then we have
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DV VGA and HDMI then we have four USB
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2.0 ports one HDMI one e sat running at
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6 GB per second then we have two USB 3.0
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ports those are running at about 10 times the speed of the USB 2.0 ports 1
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GB Ethernet and then 7.1 onboard analog
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audio thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890 gxm g65 from MSI