AMD Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition Review – overclocking performance

Today we are using the MSI 890GXM-G65 motherboard with the latest V1.7 bios released a short while ago. We have read some negative reports about this board in recent months, with some instability issues mentioned – however in our testing since it was released our board has been extremely well behaved and a fantastic overclocking product.

It isn’t a particularly high end board either, costing only £100 inc vat in the UK. We achieved no better overclocking results with the Asus Crosshair IV Formula board we have in our labs.

Performance settings for this series of results at reference speeds were kept to the bios defaults.

MSI literature for the board is as follows:
World Leading Motherboard and Graphics manufacturer, MSI, launches their brand new 890GXM-G65 Motherboard using the AMD 890GX chipset to fulfil the increasing demand for the perfect home theatre PC. In addition to tailoring to the latest AMD Phenom II processors, the 890GXM-G65 provides full support for the DirectX 10.1 and UVD 2.0 Multimedia standards to significantly enhance High-Definition audio and video effects. Along with a wide variety of output interfaces, the 890GXM-G65 allows users to build a high quality HTPC combining both high performance and high stability

The 890GXM-G65 is not only a perfect HTPC motherboard, it also allows users to unlock the full potential of their CPU for maximum performance. By allowing users to unlock up to six cores the MSI 890GXM-G65 enhances performance and saves energy. unlocking addition cores on the CPU has become the hot topic of PC users lately and this board with integrated ATI Radeon HD 4290 Graphics redefines the first choice of a fully featured motherboard.

The 890GXM-G65 includes support for DirectX 10.1, ATI Hybrid Crossfire, ATI CrossfireX for installing two high performance ATI graphics cards, USB3.0 and native SATA-III (6Gbps) for maximum data transfer speeds.

Key Features

• AMD 890GX chipset based
• Supports USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0
• OC Genie Lite: Easy Overclocking Technology
• Superb Stability: Military Class Components
• Fully-equipped Digital Output Connectors: HDMI & DVI
• Lossless 24bit/192kHz HD Audio
• Highly-efficienct HeatPipe Thermal Design

Specifications

• Support for AMD Athlon II & Phenom II Processors
• HyperTransport 3.0 supporting speed up to 5200MT/s
• AMD 890GX and SB850 Chipset
• Integrated ATI Radeon HD4290 GPU
• 4x unbuffered DIMM DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600*/1800*/2133* (OC) DRAM, 16GB Max
• 2x PCI Express x16 slot (8x 8x in multi-GPU configuration)
• 1x PCI Express x1 slot
• 1x PCI slot, support 3.3V/ 5V PCI bus Interface
• One IDE port Supports Ultra DMA 66/100/133 mode
• 5x SATA III (6Gbps) support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 mode
• 1x eSATA
• Flexible 8-channel HD audio with jack sensing
• Gigabit LAN

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