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MSI 770-G45 Value Gaming AM3 Phenom Crossfire Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2010-05-06
so today we'll be doing an unboxing of a product I've been meaning to have a look at for quite a while this is the MSI 770 G 45 so it's part of their G series or their gaming series you can see they've got a big red G here that's what that means and it has a couple of features that are pretty good first of all it has full support for nmds centum 2x4 and it also has full compatibility with Windows 7 it has their green eup technology included you know I'm actually gonna have a quick sort of zoom in here so that you can actually see what I'm talking about here now this board also like most of the 700 series chipset boards from MSI has support for the brand new phantom 2 X 6s although that's not marked on the box you just need to make sure you update the BIOS with your board before you will get support for that so down here you can see it's a m3 CPU ready which we've already been through comes with some kind of Norton software supports lossless 24-bit audio it has their easy OC switch which while it's not quite as nice as their OC Genie it's still a pretty useful little thing it's got active phase switching which gives you power savings so that means that while this motherboard has a certain number of phases to provide to the power under peak load it can actually reduce how many power phases it's using at idle to make sure that you're using less power at idle because fewer power phases means less wasted power also it features emphasize unlocked CPU core technology stable on lock so like so many AMD boards these days there is support for unlocking the extra cores in Indy's x2 and x3 CPUs that are artificially reduced for sale so here on the back we've got mostly the same stuff the active phase but all solid capacitors so that's a big one that they've actually got on the back here and I'm gonna just sort of zoom in again here and it also has support for EM flash this is a feature that was missing from MSI boards for a long time and now we're finding it almost across the board allows you to flash the BIOS without a floppy drive or or using you know bootable USB drives or anything that you just throw USB Drive on the back of the motherboard and then you boot up to the m / utility and you can flash the BIOS just like that inside the motherboard box we will find a variety of things as per the usual arrangement so let's see what we have first of all you have the i/o shield ok color coded for your convenience next we have the drivers and utilities DVD do not use that download the latest off be in the side website then we have a quick installation guide and there doesn't appear to be anything particularly quick about it it's quite large it's not too bad actually here let me just unzoom a little bit see if you see how big this guy is I'm gonna turn off my mother or my monitor so you don't have to contend with that at the back focusing so I show you how to install the CPU RAM drives graphics card around to the other side front panel headers the power setting up the BIOS install the vos and installing the drivers and utilities very nice kinda walks you through the whole process I mean really building a computer is not that hard these days the manufacturers cats and the garbage bin make it so easy for us ok here we have the user guide this is the Europe version that's interesting check that out Europe version really nice there in the garbage again sorry bear with me here get over there ok garbage can has been relocated right there ok so inside the user's guide we will find many different languages so the actual English portion is only about well it's not that thick only about this much English English English and then it goes on just like that ok so next we've got one IDE cable one SATA cable and then one molex to SATA adapter that is a fairly bare accessory package as far as cables go but if you're anything like me you've probably got about 50 SATA cables lying around anyway just get this motherboard opened up here alright so layout layout is a pretty standard sort of fare you've got all of your so far I noticed that the power adapt are the power connectors are in their ideal locations so your 4 pin power is up at the top left of the board exactly where it belongs and then you've got your am-3 socket so I'm just gonna pull this sticker up so you can have a better look at the am-3 socket along with the m3 socket you will also get support for dual channel ddr3 just like all of the CPUs that run on the am-3 socket will require then along to the side of the board we've got our 24-pin connector exactly where it belongs we've got a fairly beefy looking heatsink on the north bridge chipset okay then moving down we have an IDE pork ok so that's a side mounted one for easy access and then we have kind of a strange arrangement of the SATA port so here we've got four right angles SATA ports and then to normal we've got facing right out of the board SATA ports so that's a kind of a strange strange decision but I think I see why they made it because these two are rather these four connectors could potentially be interfered with by a full-length graphics card whereas this one is not nearly as bad down here we've got we've got three USB headers and then we've got our front panel connectors over here we can see the overall layout of the board is quite desirable so we have one PCI Express 1x connector up at the top then we have two PCI Express 16x and three PCI so if you actually install two dual with PCI Express video cards you'll be left with one PCIe 1x and then 2 or rather one PCI slot so that's pretty much your optimal configuration of there and then we've got the EZ OC switch so it actually comes with instructions written right on the board which is pretty nice so here I'm just gonna zoom in even or there and try and position this so you can see what I'm talking about so the easy OC switch has instructions right here so it says mm-hmm default is on one and two and then 10% is one up two down 15% is one down two up and then 20% over clock is flipping both of these switches down now let's have a look at the i/o connectivity on the back so we've got two ps2 ports and this is an odd one we've got a serial port so I guess this motherboard could potentially be used for industrial applications has so many peripherals that are used in sort of industries that aren't quite as up to speed as the technology industry so something like you know mining or many many different industrial applications will still need a serial port we have six USB 2.0 ports no USB 3.0 support on this board it's a relatively value minded board then we have a Gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1 audio support so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the msi 770 g 45
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