MSI NF750-G55 AM3 DDR3 SLI Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,221 words · ~6 min read
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well it's been a while since I've unboxed an MSI board and the reason for
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that is that I haven't had any sort of really interesting like really
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interesting news stuff to unbox from them lately but today I've got the NF
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750 G55 motherboard this is an NVIDIA
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enforce SLI board it's an enforce 750
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board which is something there's almost none of on the market so that's why I
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grabbed this because right now this seems to be the best value SLI board on
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the market so it's uh it's a pretty unique motherboard in that respect why
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don't we get this thing opened right up let's do a quick sort of highlight of
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what features they are going to call out here so you got your easy OC switches
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for successful OC active phase switching
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okay power saving and then some some something about lossless audio awesome
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okay so let's get this open it is oh it's also Windows 7 ready check that out
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very good so it supports Phenom 2x4s and
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uh everything under that I'm going to go ahead and assume you've got support for
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DDR3 memory on this motherboard but we'll get to that later first of all we
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will find the drivers and utilities DVD
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uh pretty much don't use anything on there you're going to want to download the latest off the MSI website then here
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we will find the quick installation guide which is quite big but the reason oh no wow
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they've actually got like everything on here they show you how to do the CPU how
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to do the RAM how to do the IDE and SATA Optical how to install graphics cards
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how to do the front panel connectors that's great they give you a little diagram there that's really handy okay
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they show you the power set settings installation hey they only show you the
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24 pin power don't forget to do your eight pin all right so we'll go ahead and
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close that up um yeah I'll do that later
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okay then we have the MSI NF 750 G55
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user guide so that's the detailed guide again it's in a bunch of languages shows
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you all of the ins and outs of this motherboard oh that's yeah is's in
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different languages okay good then we have an SLI Bridge what kind of SLI
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motherboard would it be without an SLI Bridge you can see the spacing looks like a four slot spacing based on that
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bridge but since it's a flexi Bridge who knows then we have our IO
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Shield then we have a a gray IDE cable
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that's just hideous then we have a Molex to SATA adapter and one SATA cable so
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the Assumption MSI seems to be making here is that users will be using a DVD
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Optical uh IDE drive and then a SATA uh
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hard drive or SSD drive I guess all right then we've got our little
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environmentally friend paper packaging followed up with some environmentally
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not friendly foam but what are you going to do we got some plastic here let's
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take this off and have a look at the layout of this board now like I said
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this is one of the most aggressively priced SLI boards on the market right
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now so you're not going to find necessarily all of the features you'd
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find on a more um on a more high-end board but you do have the easy OC switch
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all right so I'm not actually sure where that is but here's the little button for
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it it shows like a little gear shifter thing that's pretty cool and then you've
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got the power saving features okay active pH switching so let's take that
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off all right General layout your SLI slots are one two three four oh they're
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only three apart but you've got two PCI Express 16 you have two usable PCI
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Express 1X and one PCI slot that you're
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only really going to be able to use if you're not using another card so you
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don't have much on this board in terms of expansion slots especially if you're
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running SLI however if you're only running one card you're going to end up
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with a couple PCI E 1's of PCIe 16 which can be used as 1684 or one and then
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you've got a PCI slot so that's not actually too bad down here you've got
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three USB headers which I really like to see I hate seeing only one then you've
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got a onboard power switch you know what MSI has really stepped up to the plate
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here they are putting onboard power switches on most of their boards which
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is incredibly handy when you're troubleshooting I love that all right
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then over here we've got five SATA ports which may seem like an odd amount but
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I'm going to go ahead and guess yeah there we go that we have esad on the
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back and that's where your sixth Port is here is our chipset you're Pro I'm just
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taking a wild guess here this is an enforce chipset you're probably going to want to do what you can to keep it cool
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all right then you've got support for like I said before dual Channel DDR3
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memory here along the right hand edge of the board in its ideal location is your
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24 pin power and then up here I mistakenly said this would have an8 pin
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this has a four pin power connector this is an am3 ready board obviously because
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you do have support for DDR3 and you do need an am3 chip in order to take
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advantage of DDR3 this is actually oh I really like this check this out this is
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a really sort of beefy looking uh vrm cooling solution for such a an
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entrylevel board and I really like the way that they've sort of built it around
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everything in there it's it's the little touches you know that's where uh that's
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where a motherboard can really stand out because they've all got the same basic
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features but it's just those little things right here is the EOC switch
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which I'm not sure how to use I've never seen this one before their new thing is
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OC Genie so it seems like this is kind of the more value option okay this
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supports SLI and hybrid SLI oh yeah so this has Onboard video check that out
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okay we got a couple PS2 ports one for the mouse one for the keyboard we have
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VGA DVI and HDMI out then we have six
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USB ports 1 GB Ethernet and 7.1 audio
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there's the back of the board you got your am3 back plate and there is your
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serial sticker thank you for checking out my unboxing of the NF 750 G 55