This week, let’s find out what MSI makes of its latest and greatest GD70-series gaming-oriented AM3 motherboard, the 890FX-GD70.
On the hardware side, SATA 6Gb/s is natively supported by AMD most recent SB850 chipset, two USB 3.0 ports are provided courtesy of the usual NEC controller, and physical power, reset and ClearCMOS buttons are nothing out of the ordinary at the high end. A few less common features are a powered eSATA/USB combi port, a physical overclocking dial and Green Power button, and no fewer than five PCI Express x16 slots.
It sports great combination of black PCB, black and blue slots and silver heatsink cooling, now with added metallic blue highlighting. Only the white SATA 6Gb/s ports spoil the effect a tad. MSI’s ‘flat heatpipe’ passive cooling looks very impressive indeed – there’s as much metal on this motherboard as on any we’ve seen, though the 890FX (and the lower end GX, for that matter) do seem to need quite a bit of cooling. MSI does use a selection of “military class components” for endurance and stability, but don’t expect ruggedness on a level with the Asus Sabertooth 55i TUF.
The 890FX-GD70′s included bundle is somewhat sub-par for a high-end product. Essentially it hasn’t changed much since last year’s GD65: one CrossFire bridge, two four-pin molex to SATA power adapters, four straight SATA cables and an EIDE cable, with some handy pin header adapters and a two-port USB 2.0 bracket thrown in for good measure. One unfortunate similarity with the ASRock 890FX Deluxe3 is that the data cables do not in any way match the board. These ones are red, which clashes almost as badly as ASRock’s orange ones did with that board’s largely comparable colouring.
Board layout on the 890FX-GD70 is good, though the two-character LED readout panel will be obscured if you install an all-out CrossFire setup. MSI has thankfully gone for RAM slots with only a single clip on one side (similar to those used by Asus for a while now), making it easier to install and remove memory. The 890FX-GD70 supports DDR3 up to 2,133Mhz, which is behind Asus but ahead of most of the pack. Memory slots are logically colour-coded though not staggered.
When it comes to expansion card slots, you’re spoilt for choice as MSI provides a PCIe 1x and regular PCI slot (both coloured black) in addition to the aforementioned five PCIe x16 slots. Since they are fed 36 lanes of bandwidth, you can get two cards running at full x16 speed or four cards at up to 8x. The fifth slot is limited to 4x and will be obscured by the second graphics card, and we wonder why it’s even there as its potential is very limited. Still all together, it’s a good option after all.
Tags: 890fx gd70, am3, am3 motherboard, data cables, esata, gaming, gd70, molex, Motherboard, msi 890fx, msi 890fx gd70, msi gd70, port usb, ram slots
It’s very nice looking.