MSI 890FXA-GD70 Motherboard Review - PAGE 12

Power Consumption

The 890FX chipset did not show any significant advantage under full load. MSI's Active Phase Switching did allow the board to consume 8% less power at idle, where the processor, DIMM and southbridge phases were brought down to one. The ASUS board remained untouched however, with a quite large advantage under full load. However, with the HT link reference clock downclocked to 190MHz, as shown on page two, the system idled another 3W lower, thus beating the M4A89GTD PRO/USB3!

Conclusion

The performance of the 890FXA-GD70 was not quite up to the task. Against the ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3, it could only win in one benchmark. That is quite deceiving, but explanable. As was said in the overclocking section, the MSI board is very accurate when it comes to the HT link reference clock. At stock, it will run a nice 200.0MHz, which thus clocks the processor at an exact 3400MHz. What the ASUS and the Gigabyte board do though is overclock that reference clock a bit at stock, around 201MHz. The processor then finds itself clocked at 3415 to 3420MHz. That's enough to give a slight advantage to the competition in benchmarks. So the 890FXA-GD70 should not be punished for this. However there is not only that; the memory bandwidth was reported to be lower than the other boards, which showed up quite a lot in Left 4 Dead. Other benchmarks might have suffered a bit also.

This article's did show however that the new chipsets perform a tad better than the previous generation; while the 890FXA-GD70 was at one test of beating the (slightly overclocked) 790FX board, the 890GX has taken care of it.

The 4+1 phase power design with active switching did allow the board to idle at a lower power consumption, however, even locked at the full 4+1, it seemed to be a tad limiting for overclocking. In fact, it did not even go as far as Gigabyte's own 4+1 phase power design on the 890GPA-UD3H. At least, it was fun to work with, mainly because of the accurate HT link reference clock, as said earlier. Going below the 200MHz mark also allowed for many more possibilities, thanks to the MSI Control Center software.

What really makes the strength of the MSI 890FXA-GD70 is the few little features here and there. First of all, there are the onboard power buttons, the OC Dial and the CMOS clear button at the back, for overclockers. For storage, its extra SATA controller is great for allowing an eSATA port at the back, while still keeping the six SATA 6Gb/s ports provided by the SB850 available for internal storage, including a killer RAID setup. For a nice cooling system, there is a grand total of five fan headers, which is one more than most boards. And finally, there is the PCI-E configuration, allowing for quad-CrossfireX with dual-slot graphics cards. Not many motherboards offer this possibility on the ATX form factor.

Overall, the MSI 890FXA-GD70 is a solid board despite its tiny bit lower performance and overclocking. It will be great for anyone in need of the ultimate gaming setup.