MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 Review - PAGE 13

Overclocking

Overclocking on the MSI 790FX-GD70 was a breeze. I reached a final clock of 3.77GHz on the Phenom II x3 720 Black Edition. It was able to run the RAM at its rated frequency of 1600MHz, however raising its multiplier one notch up would bring it above what these modules are capable of. The northbridge did not complain about a higher frequency. In order not to have it downclocked, I left its multiplier one notch higher. This brought it to 2187MHz instead of the stock 2000MHz.

The overclocking buttons on the motherboard did help me. I used them to find approximately at what the baseclock maxed when using certain multipliers. While running OCCT Perestroiska, I slowly raised it, 5MHz at a time, while letting the stability test run for a few minutes between increases. When I got an error, I simply backed up a bit.

Also, during testing at these overclocked settings, the heatsinks on the motherboard were reasonably warm so MSI did a great job on that.

All in all, here are the settings I had to use:

• Baseclock of 243MHz
• CPU multiplier of x15.5, for a clock of 3766MHz
• HT multiplier of x8, for a clock of 1944MHz
• Memory multiplier of 10/3, for a clock of 1620MHz at timings 9-9-9-24-1T
• NB multiplier of x9, for a clock of 2187MHz
• CPU voltage of 1.515V

Power Consumption

I was pleased with the power consumption of the whole system. To load it, I used the same applications as I use in temperature tests, that is some Prime95 with ATITool scan for artifacts function as well as copying files from one partition to another for loading the hard drive and its controller. So using a Kill-A-Watt power meter, I got these very reasonable numbers:

• 120W at idle
• 262W at load

It seems the Green Power Genie as well as the AMD Cool'n'Quiet function do a pretty good job!

Conclusion

The MSI 790FX-GD70 has a nice layout as well as a great looks, even considering the brown PCB. The quad PCI-E x16 that can house dual-slot graphics cards is fantastic for multi-GPU setups. This motherboard also has many great features such as the overclocking knob allowing the user to play with the base clock anytime.

This AM3 board did not show a significant increase in performance compared to the AM2+/DDR2 platform. In the gaming tests, it lost some benchmarks but won a few others, while there was a tie for the last two ones. However, for system benchmarks, it got nice scores, sometimes leading by a big margin. The memory bandwitdh has without any doubts increased compared to the other AM2+ boards and it also scored much higher in the PCMark Vantage score. However, in many other benchmarks, the MSI board fell a tad behind the two others.

Concerning overclocking, the MSI motherboard achieved decent frequencies. I clocked the Phenom II x3 720 Black Edition up to 3.77GHz stable on it and it was really easy.

Overall, the 790FX-GD70 is an awesome motherboard with many innovative features. I recommend it to any gamer, be it casual or not. It is also a great board for a computer dedicated for work. Its power saving features allow it to reduce power consumption, while still delivering the performance when needed.