MSI gives us a motherboard with the NVIDIA nForce 750 SLI chipset which lets us combine a last generation CPU from AMD with a multi-GPU SLI setup and this without making a too big hole in our wallets.

INTRODUCTION

MSI is one of the giants within the PC hardware industry. They have been around for as long as I can remember. Motherboards is one of the ground stones in their business but the company have diversified into many different areas the last couple of years and as you may know, MSI is now one of the top suppliers of laptops.

Today I am going to review a very interesting motherboard from MSI, the NF750-G55. Here are the specifications:

By the specifications of the NF750-G55 it’s easy to conclude that MSI has worked hard to produce something a little extra with this board. The board offers support for SLI, Hybrid SLI and has some interesting proprietary technologies of MSI, like the “Easy OC Switch”. In this review I will not test the SLI functionality since it’s been done before, instead I will focus on the integrated GeForce 8200 chip and see what it can produce in terms of performance.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The NF750-G55 comes in a rather sober looking cardboard box of standard size. On it, MSI emphasizes the support of the latest AMD processors, the support for SLI and Hybrid SLI and some of the extra features like the True Blu-ray Audio, APS and Easy OC Switch.

The included accessories are: a manual; a quick start installation guide; a drivers and utilities CD; the I/O back panel plate; SATA and IDE cables and a SATA power converter cable.

MSI NF750-G55 IN DETAIL

Although the MSI NF750-G55 is of the ATX standard, it’s a little narrower than most other ATX boards.

There are 4 memory slots which supports up to 16GB of DDR3 (up to 1600MHz). To clarify a little here, the chipset officially only supports up to 1333MHz, but it’s possible to run the memories at 1600MHz by doing a small change to the multiplier in the BIOS.

The only heatsink on the motherboard is the heatsink located on the nForce 750a SLI circuit.

The CPU cooler is fastened with screws which I think is great since it allows you to really get a grip of how tight the cooler is fastened, much better than with plastic anchorage systems. The 4 pin connector for the CPU is located in the middle of the board.

The MSI Active Phase Switching (APS) is located to the right of the 12V ATX connector. This system is in charge of real time automatic regulation of the power feeded to the CPU. The power level is actually illustrated by 4 LEDs which is a nice extra feature.

The board has two PCI-E x16 ports and 1 PCI port. As you can see; the PCI-E ports are separated by quite a big distance. If you use a double slot card in the second PCI-E port you will not be able to use the PCI port at all. It would have been better to place the PCI port before the first PCI-E x16 port.

The internal connectivity also incorporates 5 SATA 2  ports with RAID functionality, 3 USB 2.0 ports, a COM port connector, connectors for external audio; digital S/PDIF and a CD contact.

The integrated chips for the sound and the Ethernet connectivity are the Realtek ALC889 and RTL8211CL. Both chips are of high quality and supported with excellent drivers. The Fintek chip located next to the battery is in charge of the general I/O functions of the motherboard and also makes it possible to control fans with the popular SpeedFan program.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of this motherboard is the “Easy OC Switch”. It consists of a pink switch as you can see from the image below. This switch allows us to increase the FSB of up to 35% without having to do any other changes. In principle this addition is excellent, but it will only work well if the processor you are using supports overclocking without needing an increase of the voltage.

The back panel connectivity is excellent; check the specifications above for a complete list.

INSTALLING THE TEST EQUIPMENT

For the tests of the MSI NF750-G55 I used the following hardware and software:

Here are a couple of screenshots of the hardware I used:

In the graphics test I used a resolution of 1024×800 with the highest graphics settings.

BIOS

The BIOS on this board comes from AMI (American Megatrends Inc) and is very intuitive and easy to handle when overclocking.

The menu that interested me the most was of course the Cell Menu where all the real important settings are, at least of you want to overclock your system. Even though the NF750-G55 can be considered a medium range motherboard it offers many possibilities for overclocking both the CPU and the memory modules.

The M-Flash program which is incorporated in this BIOS is actually unique to MSI motherboards. It’s a smart little program which lets us update the BIOS and even to backup and recover old BIOS versions.

There is also a menu called “User Settings”. It makes it possible to setup different “profiles” of the BIOS setting. This can come in handy if you want to quickly load a preset of overclocking settings for a gaming session or similar.

BENCHMARKING TESTING PART 1

The CPU performance of the nForce 750a chip is within the margins that I had hoped for. However the memory testing came out a little short which surprised me as this is normally a strong area with the NVIDIA chips.

BENCHMARKING TESTING PART 2

The read and write speeds of the HD were very good which means that NVIDIA have solved the driver issues which have caused the hard disk to work slower than it should on older chipsets.

REAL WORLD TESTING

What draw my attention of the above results were the poor results from the WinRAR test. My conclusion is that it must be due to the memory problem noted above.

In the test of the IGP GeForce 8200 chip I didn’t receive any remarkable results in the 3D testing so it’s easy to conclude that you shouldn’t use it for gaming. It did work just fine for playback of HD videos though.

The power usage of this system is really low, especially when it’s operating in idle mode which makes it a good choice if you are building a 24/7 system.

OVERCLOCKING CAPACITY

NVIDIA has made classic AMD overclocking chipsets in the past including the now almost mythical nForce 2 and nForce 4 platforms. So what about the nForce 750a SLI overclocking capabilities? The following screenshots says it all:

I was able to overclock the FSB to 264MHz (!) which was actually a bit surprising to me, I hadn’t expected it to be so “overclock friendly” being a medium range card.

I also tried to overclock the integrated graphics card (GeForce 8200). I managed to get it to run stable at 601/1442MHz for the core and shaders respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

My first experience with the NF750 chipset has been a pleasure. The MSI NF750-G55 is a very diverse motherboard. It can be used in a hardcore SLI high end system or it can be used as a base plate for a HTPC project thanks to the integrated VGA with HDMI output.

Generally, MSI has managed to build a great motherboard around the nForce 750a SLI chipset. Its performance and overclocking abilities are excellent as the same goes for its connectivity. The integrated graphics solution is good but not as powerful as some of the integrated chips that AMD/ATI offers.

The price of this motherboard is around $100 (90 Euro) which I feel is a bargain considering the overclocking abilities and the diversity of this board.

Pros:

• General quality
• Built-in technologies (Hybrid SLI, Easy OC Switch, APS…)
• Very complete BIOS
• Good performance
• Excellent overclocking abilities
• Excellent price

Cons:

• Nothing worth mentioning

The final score is 90 out of 100 owls, and we give the “MSI NF750-G55″ our Editor’s Choice Award.

Thanks goes out to MSI for letting me review this motherboard.

Check out our Mainboard category for alternatives!

Author: Manuel González Fernández

Translator: Vince Emiloz Sanderson

The ECS Black Series A790GXM-A, an IGP for Today’s Needs

As we all know, Elitegroup is betting everything on a market that’s very important for us — the ENTHUSIAST market — and there’s no doubt that it has surprised us by offering very low cost products with excellent component quality and performance.

Let’s take a look at the ECS BLACK SERIES 790GX, AMD’s latest chip focused on offering the highest possible performance for integrated graphics, as well as better performance in combination with its Phenom and SB 750 chips. AMD has bet a lot on providing a 1-2 punch with its AM2+ and ECS platform. Now, it’s offering a product capable of supporting new processors such as the X4 9950 with a 140W TDP. So we can expect great things from this new motherboard. Another new effort by AMD in integrated graphics was to integrate dedicated or independent memory with the IGP HD3300 (SidePort). We’ll explain what that consists of below.

First Look

ECS has definitely changed its motherboard packaging radically, including for its Black series. The box has very different silk screening than was used for its previous motherboard/chipset combination, which used the AMD 780G. The package shows the product’s main features, such as its use of solid capacitors in the CPU area, and the SidePort, ready for action with 128 MB of memory.

On the front of the box, you can clearly see that this motherboard now supports the Phenom with a 140W TDP, and incorporates solid capacitors around the processor socket.

On the back, the motherboard’s features are clearly displayed.

We can see that the package has the right accessories for the components that could be used (HDDs, DVDs, etc.).

The Motherboard

This revision of ECS’s Black series makes a good impression. I personally liked its use of black PCB and the contrast of the yellow used in the memory and PCI slots.

Here’s the back side of the unit. I noticed that PCB is perhaps a bit too thick and doesn’t bend much during installation. As you can see from the image above there is a firm support plate for the CPU socket. The PCB is very firm unlike the PCB on the 8200a, which tended to bend somewhat when force was applied to insert memory.

Let’s take a look at the motherboard’s strategic areas. We quickly see the colorful RAM memory slots, with support for memory up to dual channel 1066. There’s a discrete, but important, IDE connector, something that is slowly disappearing as the years pass — or should I say months?

On the other side of the motherboard you can see the five power phases included to support the 140W TDP Phenoms with greater stability. You can also see one of the features shown on the packaging — the use of solid capacitors around the power phases, and an 8-pin connector to keep the PC fully powered and stable.

I want to highlight ECS’s somewhat aggressive use of passive heatsinks, something that at first was very simple. In this model, I’m satisfied with the use of a heatsink for the MOSFETs just a little above the one for the HD 3300. They do their job very well.

Let’s look at the lower part of the motherboard. The two red PCI-Es stand out. Each one operates at 16X speed, or both at 8X speed, so that those who want to use a CF have enough space. An HD 4850 CF would be a good idea. Above, you can see a Molex connector for use with a CF, as mentioned earlier.

In the next photo, we can see the HDMI port, 6 USB connectors, 8-channel audio, and PS/2 connectors. You can also see the 2 integrated GigaLan network ports, and the analog VGA video connector. I think it would have been great to add a DVI port, as well as something that’s a bit unusual in modern motherboards — a COM port. They bring me happy memories, along with my two-button ball mouse.

ECS has provided 6 SATAS to support RAID 0/1/5/10, as well as a floppy disk connector, although that feature has tended to disappear as time goes on. It’s worth mentioning that the IDE and floppy connectors are both in good positions, so users can take the PC apart without damaging anything.

A zoomed view of the BIOS, which is soldered in. That means it can’t be replaced if it fails or has an error. I hope that in the future, ECS will provide a way to remove it.

This photo clearly shows the motherboard’s ON/OFF switches. ECS has done well to provide these in the Black series.

The Motherboard Bared

This little item (an ALC888S) provides 8-channel HD audio and a Realtek optical SPDIF connector.

Here’s AMD’s new entry in the high-performance integrated graphics field, the 790GX. Without a doubt, it’s the best IGP on the market, even considering NVIDIA’s new 9300GT.

Here’s the southbridge that controls connectors like SATA, USB, and the network connector. We’ll say more about it below.

An extra-zoomed view of the sideport memory chip. It gives gameplay extra zing.

Features of the 790GX and Its SB750

This is AMD’s new IGP, the previously mentioned 790GX, which has an HD 3300 graphics card. As we all know, its predecessor was the HD 3200 (780G), and it was designed to have more power for games. Sure enough, it’s about 28% faster, depending on the configuration. In combination with the SB750, the 790GX offers support for 140W processors, like the one we’ll use in this review, the X4 9950. Previously, the 780G + SB700 only supported 95W.

To provide better performance, AMD also designed a new architecture, both for manufacturing this IGP and for the SB’s features. The 790GX uses a 55-nm fabrication process with higher 700 Mhz nuclear frequencies and 40 stream processors, with a memory bandwidth of 128 bits. It supports DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.0. Our sample had a pair of PCI-E sockets for use with multiple GPUs (the 780G could only handle one graphics card). The best thing about this is that you can use this pair of PCI-Es to run CrossfireX with two GPUs. Incredible, yes?

This is another AMD innovation. The most recent SB 750 is full of surprises. Among them is its ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration), which according to AMD promises to increase the clock speed of Phenom BE processors under overclocking. Let’s take a brief look at this.

What Is ACC?

Do you remember why I said that the combination of the 790GX+SB 750 and a Phenom BE would be AMD’s 1-2 punch? The main purpose is to increase the clock speed of the Phenom, especially in the Black Edition. This is achieved by an internal communication function called “ACC Link.”

For example, let’s take AMD’s previous SB, the 700. Normally, we could reach frequencies of about 2.4 GHz to 3.0 GHz with it, taking into account the user’s profile and the processor’s. But now, with the new 750, we can theoretically achieve an increase of between 2.4 GHz and 3.2 GHz.

How Is This New Feature Used?

It’s very simple. AMD has given us a tool that from my point of view is the best for overclocking its microprocesors. It’s called AOD (AMD Overdrive). Using it, we can configure “all cores” or “per core.”

It’s important to emphasize that this changes the factory voltage settings for both the processor and the SB. We need to keep the increased heat in mind, to avoid component damage. This is a great AMD innovation for us as enthusiasts — wouldn’t you agree?

BIOS

Let’s take a look at the inside of the motherboard, and at the options that the AMIBIOS offers. In this brand of motherboards, we’re used to seeing the well known American Megatrends brand. We’ll look at a few things here — overclocking options, voltages, and the chipset.

Advanced Chipset Setup

In this screen, we clearly see the following options for the internal graphics mode. We can give a performance boost to our dedicated graphics memory (128 MB) by adding a little RAM, according to the following options:

*UMA-(Unified Memory Architecture) – This unified memory architecture is useful for integrated graphics. We can devote part of the main system RAM completely to video, adding the memory we need.

*SidePort – This technology dedicates the 128 MB memory chip to the motherboard’s integrated graphics and increases bandwidth. This was available on the older 780G and continues with the 790GX.

*UMA+SidePort – This option lets us combine these to provide exceptional graphics performance by dedicating 128 MB and adding additional RAM capacity.

Below, we see the configurations we can give to additional memory (UMA) and to the IGP core speed. We can also apply overclock to the IGP and configure the SidePort speed.

Finally, we see memory options such as Ganged and Unganged mode, and at the bottom, the HDMI options.

M.I.B. (MB Intelligent BIOS)

Here, we can configure items such as the processor, RAM memory, and voltages. I have no doubt that this is part of what will make ECS a winner in the enthusiast market. Having more configuration options will help us achieve better overclocking, with great stability and better options, without spending a lot of money.

Looking at the M.I.B. screen, we see a brief but adequate menu that makes overclocking simple.

AMD CPU Function

With this option, we can control our system’s multipliers. We can directly control things such as the voltage. The maximum value shown in this BIOS, 1.55, is enough to achieve high speeds, thanks to our Black Edition.

Memory Configuration

This section lets you manually configure system RAM, frequencies, intervals, and latencies.

Test Setup

SOFTWARE:

Windows XP Profesional SP3

Windows Vista Ultimate 32Bits SP1

SiSoft Sandra Lite XI

SuperPi 1.5

Everest Ultimate

GPU-Z 0.2.8

AMD OverDrive 2.10

CPU-Z 1.48

GRAPHICS SOFTWARE

3DMark 06

PCMark 05

CINEBENCH R10

ScienceMark 2.0

Games

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 5: World at War

Jericho by Codemasters

Company of Heroes

Test Methodology

All software tests were carried out with the processor in its stock setting to get the most concrete possible evaluation of the performance of the chipset and IGP. When testing game performance, the previous 780G chipset was used for comparison, to measure the 790GX’s improvements over it. The average frame per second figure was measured only at 800×600 and 1024×768 resolution, without filters, with low detail, to allow for fluid gameplay. At the end, measurements were made with the 790GX’s IGP slightly overclocked, to see the noticeable effect this had on the games. We should also mention that Vista Ultimate was used only to gather data in the ScienceMark 2.0 benchmark

Results

Syntetic Tests

3D Mark 05

This test has always been one of my favorites, and the passage of time hasn’t made it less important. The benchmark was run with 1024×768 resolution. As you can see, the 790GX won by a wide margin.

3D Mark 06

Games

In this section, we used resolutions of 800×600 and 1024×768, with no AA/AF. At higher resolutions, it’s often hard to use the 780G for gameplay. Note that the IGPs were set to their stock speed, so the test would run under DX9.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

The frames where we took measurements involved full combat, with lots of enemy bullets whizzing past us. This helped us do a better job of contrasting our competing “enemies,” the HD 3200 and HD 3300.

Call of Duty 5: World at War

Let’s see what happens in the most recent entry from our friends at Activision, with its even higher level of war.

As you can see, the 790GX didn’t have a big advantage over the 780G. Both performed very well.

Jericho by Codemasters

This is one of my favorite games, with a lot of graphical detail. It definitely made our integrated graphics cards sweat.

The 790GX performed much better, achieving a much better average frame rates.

Company of Heroes

I couldn’t pass without trying one of my favorite strategy games in this comparison.

The Real Tests

In this section, we’ll just test the general performance of the 790GX chipset and its SB750. Maybe in the next review, we’ll make a full comparison with ECS’s 780G Ultra.

In the WinRaR test, a 1.5GB file was uncompressed, as well as one of 500MB and another of about 200MB.

Switching the OS to Vista, we ran the CINEBENCH R10 test.

OVERCLOCKING!!

As we all know, here’s the best part of the tests. We cranked up the processor and the IGP, speeding up the 3.4GHz CPU and the C850/450 IGP with 384MB in a way that did not damage the motherboard. We applied this configuration to games. For these Marks, we added an additional increment to better measure the extra performance using AMD OverDrive. We’ll show the maximum performance reached by both parts.

Games: HD 3300OC, C850/450, NO AA, NO AF, low detail, run in DX9 for better fluidity.

3D Marks with Overclocking

Here, we added a little more speed to the stable IGP. The results were as follows.

We achieved high overclocking for the micro and the IGP…

We also achieved high overclocking in the processor, with a considerable improvement in SuperPi.

Conclusion

This product has very good features. It’s clear that ECS offers high performance at a low price for adequate play with the IGP or in CF mode for those who seek much higher performance. It’s important to note that ECS has opened a path in the enthusiast market for those with scant resources. We’re pleased about that, since you don’t have to spend a lot for this performance increase. I’ve seen it for around $130. If that seems a bit high, consider its excellent range of overclocking. It may not be the best thing out there, but for a somewhat basic motherboard, it’s on the plus side and leaves us with a good feeling.

This motherboard offers very good features for its price, including ON/OFF and RESET buttons, double LAN, solid capacitors (not everywhere, but in most places), HDMI, and a good implementation of power phases. Its overclocking isn’t extreme, but it’s good and stable. Its heatsinks aren’t the best we’ve seen, but they do the job.

One negative point is its very frugal BIOS, which doubtless isn’t the final version and is in need of updates. I’d like to see ECS work a bit harder to offer updates that correct some existing errors. I’d also like to see them add a DVI port. Other motherboard manufacturers seem to have put more effort into their products, but for the price, this one is okay.

Ratings

The final score is 88 out of 100 owls, and we give the “ECS Black Series A790GXM-A Motherboard” our Recommended Award.

Translated by Ed Winograd

Written by Gustavo Ruiz Vega