MSI 890GXM-G65 Motherboard

Introduction:

A lot of interesting things have happened in the world of motherboards recently. The advent of SATA 6Gbps means our storage needs will have all the bandwidth they’ll need for at least a little while. USB 3.0 means our flash drives can join in on the bandwidth fun as well. It’s no surprise that a company like MSI decided to incorporate both of these new technologies into their new AMD based motherboard, the 890GXM-G65. This new board will also support AMD’s brand new 6-core Thuban processors, all while packaged in a small Micro-ATX shell.

Specifications:

Socket	AM3
CPU (Max Support)	Phenom II
AM3 CPU Ready	Y
FSB / Hyper Transport Bus	up to 5200MT/s
Chipset	AMD® 890GX+SB850
DDR2 Memory	N/A
DDR3 Memory	DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600*/1800*/2133*(OC)
Memory Channel	Dual
DIMM Slots	4
Max Memory (GB)	16
PCI-Ex16	2
PCI-E Gen	Gen2 (1×16, 1×8)
PCI-Ex4	N/A
PCI-Ex1	1
PCI	1
IDE	1
SATAIII	5
SATAII	N/A
RAID	0/1/5/10
LAN	10/100/1000*1
TPM	1
USB 3.0 ports (Rear)	2
USB 2.0 ports (Rear)	4
Audio ports (Rear)	6+Optical SPDIF
Serial ports (Rear)	N/A
Parallel ports (Rear)	N/A
1394 ports (Rear)	N/A
eSATA	1
Display Port	N/A
VGA	1
HDMI	1
DVI	1
VGA Share Memory (MB)	512
DirectX	DX10.1
Form Factor	M-ATX
DrMOS	N/A
APS	Y
Sideport Memory	Y
SLI	N/A
3-way SLI	N/A
Hybrid SLI	N/A
CrossFire	Y
Hybrid CrossFire	Y
D-LED2	N/A
Green Power Genie	N/A

A Closer Look:

The front of the box shows that the board is using the new 890GX chipset. While it doesn’t explicitly say it on the box, this board will support the new 6-core Thuban chips with the latest installed BIOS.

The onboard Radeon 4290 means this board has a plethora of video connection possibilities right out of the box. It won’t be maxing out Crysis any time soon, but should work for some light gaming. With the small form factor and the various video connectors, this motherboard falls into an interesting category. On the one hand, it would make for an excellent HTPC build, by utilizing the HDMI port. On the other hand, it can perform as a high performance portable LAN box, by using the 2 PCI x16 slots for CrossfireX or Hybrid Crossfire and a high performance CPU (think 6-core Thuban). It’s not often that motherboards exhibit this kind of versatility.

Here we can see the new SATA 6Gbps connectors. You get 5 of them with this board. I like that they included the odd one out in a position on the board. Some people like the side mounted SATA connectors, while others hate them. This way you have the option the use both kinds. The side mounted connectors help save space on the board, but can be difficult to plug in on some cases.

The MSI 890GXM has 2 PCIE x16 ports, enabling it to do CrossfireX. The little red switch at the bottom of the picture is the Easy OC Switch. It allows you to effortlessly overclock the processor by 10%, 15% or 20% by flipping the switches. This is nice for people that want to overclock,but are afraid to mess with all of the often times vague and confusing settings in the BIOS.

When I first saw this board, I instantly thought HTPC. This is why we decided to try it out in that kind of configuration and mount it in our Glacialtech Altair A381 Media Center PC Case.

Test Rig:

• Glacialtech Altair A381 Media Center PC Case
• MSI 890GXM-G65 Motherboard
• AMD Athlon II x2 255
• 4GB Crucial Ballistx Tracer RAM
• Crucial 128GB SSD
• Windows 7 x64

SiSoft Sandra:

We love to use SiSoft as it provides a wide barrage of benchmarks for a particular system

	Cache and Memory	Memory Bandwidth

The cache and memory bandwidth can’t hold up to the Phenom x4, but it does come pretty close to the x3.

	Memory Latency	Multi-Core Efficiency

The memory latency benchmark shows the latency is real close across the board. Our chip proves more efficient than most, by having a nice low inner-core latency.

	Power Management Efficiency	Processor Arithmetic

The power management and processor arithmetic come in at what we would expect for using a dual core chip.

	Processor Multi-Media

This test shows how adept a processor is at handling multi-media instructions.

3D Mark Vantage:

3D Mark is used to gauge a system’s 3D performance capabilities. The 890GXM-G65 has an onboard Radeon 4290, so this test gives you an idea of the kind of performance you can expect from it. The results show a GPU score of 2512, this isn’t very high. Don’t expect to play Crysis on max settings with the onboard card. It is still very capable of playing back HD movies at 1080p though.

PC Mark Vantage:

PC Mark is made by the same creators of 3D Mark. While 3D Mark focuses more on potential gaming ability, PC Mark focuses on overall system performance. The system as configured, scored 6055. If you look at the sub scores, you can see that the gaming suite is one of the lowest scores. This is again due to the Radeon 4290 not being that powerful.

Unigine Heaven:

Unigine Heaven is a new benchmarking tool that we’re using. It runs through a scene and records the FPS that the system scores.

We can see that the average FPS is 3.2. Like I said before, intense 3D graphics are not the forte of the onboard 4290. This can be remedied easily by adding in a discrete graphics card.

Cinebench 11.5:

Cinebench functions similarly to Unigine. It runs through a scene and tests the OpenGL capability of the card. We see that the onboard 4290 only weighs in at 5.13 FPS, making the video more choppy than a bad slap chop infomercial.

Conclusion:

It’s not very often that we come across a product that has quite the versatility of the 890GXM-G65. MSI has created a motherboard that fills two separate niches, the HTPC market and the portable gaming rig market. The SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 ports mean that it won’t fade into obsolescence  for at least a few years. Even though the onboard 4290 isn’t powerful enough for serious gaming, it works perfectly for video playback. We were able to watch full 1080p video without any dropped frames. MSI has also gone to great length to make overclocking really simple. The Easy OC Switch means that people who were too frightened to try overclocking now have an easy in. After an update to the latest BIOS, the board also has the ability to unlock the x2 and x3 phenom chips into x4’s. You mileage may vary on the success of that, but it does have the ability.

The 890GXM-G65 fills 2 niches quite nicely. It will make a good addition for your next space conscious build.