MSI 785GM-E65 - AM3 Motherboard Review
Welcome to PCWizKidsTechTalk. Today I'm very excited to show you the MSI 785GM-E65 AM3 motherboard. Now this one here is the latest from MSI just release last week. It has of course the latest chipset, the 785G north bridge chipset and the south bridges at 710. Now this one here is for AM3 processors only so it is an AM3 Socket motherboard supporting all the latest Athlon II and the Phenom II. You know the dual cores and the quad cores with DDR3 support of course all the way up to 16 gigs of RAM you can install on there.
It has an integrated video card. This time it is the HD 4200. It is the latest support for the 4200 is Direct X10.1. You’ve got the Shader model 4.1 support as well and it has a whole slew of standard features that show HD audio, your gigabyte LAN built-in of course. All of that is in there.
Let’s take a closer look at it more in detail here. So starting from the bottom board where the south bridge chipset is under that MSI heat sink that you see right there. It has got a nice, dark silver and black and blue color scheme going on this board and here in the center you’ve got the north bridge chipset as you can see another nice little heat sink on that with a pipe going to the voltage regulators. You can see the solid, high quality capacitors there. This is definitely a board that can take all kinds of CPU’s all the way up until 140W CPU. So if you got a heavy Quad core that want to install on here you do not need to be afraid with this micro-ATX board because it will support it.
So the other thing about this board that you want to take into consideration is DDR3 up to 16 gigs, that is great. So future expendability is there but if you have older parallel port connector that you need to connect there it has to support for the header for that. Floppy drive connector has a support for that. Also an IDE connector if you have an old drive so on top of that you can see the power connector and further down below you’ve got five SATA connectors, four at the front, one at the back and you can see there also USB headers along the side here as well as the CMOS, reset an optical header there, your FireWire ends the audio headers are right beside there.
On top of all those headers you’ve got the PCI Express slot there and the two PCI slots right there and you also have one PCI Express, one X slot. Now right beside that black little slot there you’ve got the switch, the easy overclocking switch. So for those of you that don’t know how to overclock in the BIOS then you can use this little switch and there is basically only three settings, the default overclocking, the front side bus to 10%, 15% or 20% for the front side bus so that you can overclock it hassle free. So that’s one way to over clock it.
Personally I love this method but I like to get my hands dirty and going into the BIOS and tweaking things quite a bit. So I'm going to be able to over clocking it using the BIOS. Now look this at the back, you’ve got the standard optical for a multimedia type of board.
You’ve got the PS2 connection. You have VGA and DVI out. You’ve got tons of USB as well as the HDMI out of course, your FireWire plug, some more USB and e-SATA out as well. So there is lot of support there as well as your gigabyte LAN and your HD audio connections. So also, you got everything for your full surround sound multimedia PC.
Here’s a look at the back for those who are interested on that charcoal, dark brown look there with the back plate for the CPU already included. Here is my test system like I said. Here are all the parts latest and greatest on this Lian Li case that I am using as you can see right here. Okay and booting this up into the BIOS the interesting part is the sound menu of this award BIOS that it’s using and it detected the latest AMD2 Phenom II X2 550 which is running at 3.1 GHz, so it detected everything flawless with this BIOS. I did not have to upgrade or anything, lots of features in here for overclocking and tweaking and that’s what I really like about this board. Lot of flexibility to go in and really maximizes the most you can out of your memory and the CPU and not only that but also the onboard VGA. You can actually overclock the HD 4200 video card that’s onboard further from it’s default 500 megahertz. So you can in here and just increase up to 600 or 700 and then try it out and see how it does. So this is very, very interesting.
Now going into Windows 7 RTM release which I have installed here you can see the CPU Z settings on this processor, how it detected it. Here are the defaults that it of course is able to run hassle free and here is the cache information as well as the motherboard information of course I'm getting that and it’s detected fine and the default memory timing as well. I did not overclock anything yet. So these are all the defaults and everything is right on the money detected properly and stable including the catalyst. They installed the catalyst ATI drivers and it detected everything fine. You can see here the default core and memory clock speeds for this HD 4200 which I mentioned.
Now going into temperatures. If you run this at no load what I have here this board was very nice. It kept my processor at a nice, cool 18 or 19 and on full load. I had it about 27 degrees Celsius. So the board itself was nice and cool as well so this is very, very, very nice board. Now let’s try to push it and make it do the most it can so I run the AMD over drive utility which automatically overclocks and it gave me 3.5 GHz. So it worked really well with the board, memory and CPU that I had to automatically overclock it.
But then I went into the BIOS and I overclock it further by tweaking all the BIOS and I got 3.8 GHz so that’s 700 megahertz more and also overclock the memory a little bit as well to 688 times two because it’s DDR3 effectively. So there you go very, very good board for overclocking and temperatures which is about 10 degrees more when overclocking it on full load, 40 degrees Celsius total 3.8 GHz on this Phenom II X2 550.
Even the video overclock using the BIOS settings right from 500 megahertz to seven very nice. So included with this box you can get obviously quick installation manual. You're going to get the driver CD of course with utilities from MSI which you can install to tweak your and also you’ve got the regular manual, the book. It has everything you need about the board as well as the I/O shield plate that goes at the back of your case so color-coded there. It’s so very nice and a few cables with a few connectors.
So you got your SATA, the red one there and you got a power connector, the Molex to SATA power connector and also an IDE connector as well.
So that is basically it that’s you’re full package from MSI stable board, very power efficient, very good support for all overclocking in the latest CPU from AMD. I liked to thank MSI for providing it and I hope you enjoyed this video and thank you for watching.
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