Boards from AMD are a good all-rounder for most users, who want to buy one of their well-rounded computers in this large and varied computer environment. As of the AMD’s struggle to find, or create products to go head to head with the core 2’s with the introduction of the Phenom series way back in 2006. As they hit a few spots in the good red zone, they still find one of the chips to be faulty, hence the TLB bug, created another revision and a lower clock stock yield in some of the Phenom range. As well as the chipset, compatibility to the other processors, made a bit confusing on the chipsets range capability, with some even not completely playable in some processors or now allowed to be combined in.
On the AMD side, the choices are much more palatable with graphics on the 770G, 780G and 785G that is being released having much higher frame rate compared to the Intel side of things. This is despite the fact that the AMD CPUs tend to be a little slower in performance versus their Intel counterparts. The 785G chipset introduces DirectX 10.1 support to the integrated space, and Universal Video Decoder 2 to the AMD chipset. MSI is one of the first of the motherboard makers releasing a motherboard using this chipset and today’s review is on the MSI 785G-E65 motherboard just announced this week.
The motherboard supports all current AMD AM3 CPUs including the 955 Black Editions, the 810, the 7xx series and Athlon 2 CPUs. AM2+ CPUs will not fit in the Socket as there are two pins extra on that CPU, but AM3 CPUs will work on AM2+ motherboards due to the configuration of the pins. The AM3 CPUs support DDR3 memory up to DDR3-1333MHz.
Overall of the layout of the 785G motherboard series an ATX and a mini-ATX interleave great for people who like a choice of a small media PC with another for a cheap discrete graphics built-in. As the board sports the simple AM3 support with a mix of DDR3 memory, the numerous PWM’s and some storage solutions like four SATA, one IDE, and a bunch of extension for the front and some back ports like DVI, VGA ports and one HDMI for the connection of the onboard HD4200 chipset to run in. Most part, the improvement of the 8 channel inboard sound chip looks more promising in HD TVPC, in one package looks more of a good bargain and with the combination of cheaper than usual processors, creates a cheaper alternative to the Intel side of configurations.
As for the benchmarks in synthesis in mutli-threading and also in CPU to RAM performance, we see a little below of the performance standards, only the memory latency and timing making it an ideal suit for loading media player or threading, while the overall speed is lower to the older 780G and the much better high-end 780FX. But as a normal mini-ATX form factor and a little difficulty on high intensity benchmarks, we tend to find this okay mark for this board, but some short comings, like a sudden slowing in reading and writing in SDD can be fixed by some driver updates. As for MSI’s 785G is a good all-round media plater PC config in any price range.