Gadgetory

so today I'll be doing a quick motherboard unboxing this is from MSI gaming line of motherboards you can tell because it has a big red G on it wow I actually just realized as I was saying that that this is a G I knew about the color coding but I had no I see look it's the same stylized G for gaming series this is a micro ATX motherboard built on AMD's 890 GX chipset so it uses one of the latest chipsets from AMD it is a g65 suffix so the M means micro ATX g65 denotes fairly high-end probably about as high-end as you're gonna go on em ATX okay we've got a few logos on the front so why don't we have a look here it's HDMI so it has HDMI out excellent thank you it has security by Norton okay EU p msi ready some kind of green thing they've done that it's a tree then we have autumn overclocking OC Genie this is actually a pretty cool feature I had this I covered this in my core i5 overclocking guide then we have six SATA 6 gigabits per second or SATA 3 as well as USB 3.0 let's go around to the back it has a heat pipe and it supports lossless audio ok let's open this thing up so accessories it a Massiah does a pretty good job as far as their accessory packages go but this is a micro ATX board so you expect to find a little bit less first we've got an i/o seal so we can already see basically what we're gonna have on the back of the board but I'm not gonna give away any surprises now then we have a drivers and utilities DVD don't use it download the latest off the MSI website the quick installation guide is about three feet wide and shows us all of the basics so they show a CPU RAM Drive graphics card front panel headers power BIOS OS and driver installation so you could in theory ohh camera man's trying to look at this for some reason there you go ok you could in theory setup your computer with this Quick Start Guide so thank you on the side for that and then if that guide is not enough for you then there's a full user's guide which is thick and fuzzy French what else we got here German Inge oh wow I don't know Russian I think that's all not I'm not sure and also English at the beginning so it's a fairly thin manual actually there's not a whole lot to it okay great next we have IDE one molex to SATA adapter and one SATA cable this yeah yeah you're probably gonna want more than one SATA cable with a high end board like this I would have liked to see a couple more included but the reality of it is SATA cables don't cost a whole lot and if you're anything like me you've probably got a couple hundred of them lying around anyway so given that you don't need any kind of special SATA cable four SATA 6 gigabits per second I think it doesn't make much of a difference how many they include okay next we have the board itself so first of all we have the power savings so ApS active phase switching so the unique power saving design for any OS basically what they're doing is they're switching how many phases of power the CPU uses depending on the load of the system and it will actually use less power overall that way then if say they had a sixteen phase CPU power delivery design if you actually run all 16 phases at all times it is going to hurt your power consumption although it'll be delivering very clean power so when you're delivering less power you can actually turn off some of the phases okay so here why don't we start in the middle of the board where all the action is this is an am-3 socket so you have support for all the latest AMD quad cores and since this is an eight ninety G X I would fully expect there to be support for the upcoming AMD six core CPUs next we've got a four pin power connector up at the top left so you can tell that they're not expecting to deliver a whole ton of power to the CPU so you're not gonna be doing any extreme like liquid nitrogen overclocking on this board but it's going to be more than adequate obviously for even the highest TDP CPUs from AMD which is a hundred and forty watt speaking of which this is cooling your voltage regulation modules and then you've got one small heat pipe going down to the chipset so that's your eight nine dgx chipset and then down here is your South Bridge which is running did did it did today I did it again five SATA 6 gigabits per second ports so something to note about this AMD board versus any teleport out there right now is that you've got six SATA 6 gigabits per second ports including your eSATA port on the back and that is more than you'd see on almost any Intel board because they're actually running off the AMD chipset rather than running off a third-party chipset added by the motherboard manufacturer so that's pretty cool you've only got five here so the sixth one is actually on the back panel ddr3 so we have support for dual channel ddr3 and they're color-coded so you would install the modules side-by-side so if you have two modules you'd put them both in the blue and then both in the black your 24 pin connectors in its ideal location along the right-hand edge of the board and let's see what else we've got here for regular or rather regular for interesting features easy OC switch let me see what kind of a switch they've implemented I have never seen this particular switch before so I would love to comment on how it works but I actually don't know the OC Genie switch I've seen before it's just a push button but ya know it looks like they've implemented a slightly different system this time around so yeah you just switch it back and forth like that oh I hope I can put those back yeah there we go okay so you've got USB headers for so you could hook up like four front USB ports a card reader some other thing oh here we go hey hey hey here's the manual huh easy OC switch it's right there on the motherboard so default is both up so for a 10% overclock you push down switch number 2 for a 15% overclock you push down switch number 1 and then for a 20% overclock you push down both switches there you go that's your easy OC switch so let's put those back to no overclock ok expansion cards so you can put in 2 PCI Express 16x graphics cards 1 PCI Express One X and one PCI now I would have liked to see these two switched around because if you're buying a relatively high end although micro-atx in there by lower end board you'd probably want to be using a dual slot video card and if you're doing that then you'd probably want to have an additional PCIe slot that said what they have done with this particular layout is they've given you a way to install one graphics card one PCIe other card so if you're not using two graphics cards and then one PCI so it seems like kind of a flexible layout and you're there's always compromises that you have to make on a micro ATX board as far as expansion slots are concerned because there's only four let's have a look at the back of the board so we've got one of those mouse keyboard ps2 combo ports we have optical audio out then we have DVI VGA and HDMI then we have four USB 2.0 ports one HDMI one eSATA running at six gigabit per second then we have two USB 3.0 ports those are running at about ten times the speed of the USB 2.0 ports one Gigabit Ethernet and then 7.1 onboard analog audio thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 890 G xmg 65 from MSI