MSI 790FX-GD70 Socket AM3 Motherboard Review

Bundle and BIOS

The MSI box is attractive in its design and proudly proclaims the features on the board.

The bundle is pretty decent with the board. It comes with a manual, quick start guide, user guide, the driver and app cd, the MSI extras CD, a back plate, Crossfire bridges, IDE, floppy and SATA cables, power adapters and several header extensions to make it easier to use the headers on the board. There are lots of goodies here!

This is the main page of the AMI BIOS.

Here are the Standard CMOS Features.

These are the Advanced BIOS Features.

You have your Integrated Peripherals.

Here’s Power Management.

This is the Hardware monitor.

This shows the Green Power age.

You can set a password for the BIOS here.

Here’s the top of the Cell Menu…

…and here is the bottom half of the Cell Menu

The CPU FSB Frequency goes up to 600.

The CPU multiplier goes up to x32.5.

The CPU-NB frequency multiplier goes up to x20.

Here is the Advanced Clock Calibration. The options are Disabled, Auto, All and Per core. Setting this to all or per core allowed our triple-core processor to be unlocked and add a fourth core. We will write more on that later in another review!

This shows the auto overclock technology.

Here is the OC booster.

Here is the OC Dial Function.

Memory Z page lets you select each memory bank to see info about the dimm, as you see in the next picture…

DDR timings can be set here…

DDR divider…

All the voltages we will show at the max available.

1.55v max for the CPU VDD Voltage.

CPU-NB VDD goes up to 1.55v.

Vcore goes up to 1.955v, which is plenty. Here are a few other voltages to look at…

Vdimm goes up to 2.4v…