Saturday, December 3, 2011

Review of MSI NF750 - G55 Motherboard



INTRODUCTION

MSI is one of the giants in the PC hardware industry. They have been around for as long as I can remember. Motherboard is one of the stones in the soil of their business, but the company has diversified in many different areas the last few years, and as you know May, MSI is one of the major suppliers of laptops.

Today I will examine a very interesting motherboard from MSI, NF750-G55. Here are the specifications:

MSI NF750-G55

Processor Support AMD ® ​​Phenom (TM) II / Athlon (TM) II / Phenom (TM) with the AM3 package.

Chipset NVIDIA ® nForce 750a SLI chipset, a

Hyper Transport Bus HyperTransport 3.0 supporting speed up to 5200MT / s

of a dual memory support DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600 (OC)

- 4 DDR3 DIMM (240pin/1.5V)

-. Supports up to 16GB

O Slots 2 PCI Express x16 slot with x16 operation (PCI Express Bus SPEC V2.0 compliant)

When the two PCI Express x16 slots, all the plows installed, the PCIE x 16 lanes will organize a car shape x16/x0 at x8/x8.

O 2 PCI Express x1 slots

o 1 PCI slot, support 3.3V/5V PCI bus interface.

On-Board IDE to an IDE port for NVIDIA ® nForce 750a SLI

- DMA 66/100/133 mode Supports Extreme

- Supports PIO, Bus Master Mode

- Can connect up to two IDE devices

On-Board SATA to 5 SATA II ports NVIDIA ® nForce 750a SLI

o 1 eSATA II ports for NVIDIA ® nForce 750a SLI

- Supports storage and data transfer speed up to 3Gb / s

1-5 RAID Function SATA II support RAID 0 1 0 +1 / 5 or JBOD mode, the NVIDIA ® nForce 750a SLI

Audio Chipset Realtek ALC889 integrated ®

- Flexible 8-channel audio with jack sensing

- compliant with Azalia 1.0 Spec

LAN Supports 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet by Realtek 45CL

internal I / O Connectors - ATX 24-pin power connector

- ATX 4-pin 12V CPU power connector

- CPU x 1/System x 3 FAN connectors

- CD-in connector

- Clear CMOS jumper

- button

- chassis intrusion switch connector

- Front panel audio connector

- Front panel connector

- Serial port connector

- 3 x USB 2.0 connector support additional 6 ports

- 1 x Floppy disk drive connector

- 5 x Serial ATA II connectors

- 1 x ATA133 IDE connector

- 1 x SPDIF-out header

- 1 x TPM modulates the header

- 1 x OC Switch

on the rear panel I / O Ports - 1 x PS / 2 keyboard

- 1 x PS / 2 mouse

- 1 x 6 in 1 audio jack

- 6 x USB 2.0 ports

- 1 x RJ45 LAN jack

- 1 x eSATA connection

- 1 x DVI-D port

- 1 x Graphic Card port

- 1 x HDMI port

other features MSI's Active Phase Switching

MSI just OC Switch

MSI Live Update online

MSI Live Update 4

NVIDIA Hybrid (TM) SLI

True Audio Blu-ray

True Audio Blu-ray

...

First impressions

NF750-G55 comes in a rather sedate looking cardboard box of standard size. For this, MSI says the support of the latest AMD processors, support for SLI and Hybrid SLI, and some extra features such as True Blu-ray Audio, APS and easy OC Switch.

Included accessories are:. Manual, quick start installation CD Drivers and Utilities, I / O panel on the back panel, SATA and IDE cables and SATA power converter cable

MSI NF750-G55 in detail

Although MSI NF750-G55 is a standard ATX, it's a bit narrower than most other ATX boards.

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

just a heatsink on the motherboard is the heatsink on the nForce 750a SLI circle.

CPU cooler is fastened by screws, which I think is great because it allows you to get really tight grip that the cooler is fastened, much better than the plastic anchor sustavima.4 pin connector for the CPU is in the middle of the plate.

MSI Active Phase Switching (APS) is on the right side of the 12V ATX connector. This system is in charge of real-time automatic control of power feeded to CPU.Razina power actually illuminates the 4 LEDs as a nice extra feature.

board has two PCI-E x16 slots and 1 PCI port. As you can see, the PCI-E ports are separated by considerable distances. If you use a dual slot card in another PCI-E port will not be able to use the PCI port at all. It would be better to PCI port before the first PCI-E x16 ports.

internal link also contains 5 SATA 2 ports with RAID functionality, 3 USB 2.0 ports, port COM port, connections for external audio,. Digital S / PDIF and CDs contact

integrated chips for sound and Ethernet connectivity are the Realtek ALC889 and RTL45CL. Both chips are high in quality and support with excellent vozačima.Fintek chip located near the battery is responsible for the overall I / O functions of the motherboard and allows you to control fans with SpeedFan popular programs.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of this motherboard is "Easy OC Switch." It consists of a pink button as you can see from the image below. This switch allows us to increase the FSB up to 35% with no connection of any other changes. Basically, this is a great addition, but it will only work well if you use the processor supports overclocking without the need to increase voltage.

back panel connectivity is excellent. Check the specifications above for a complete list of

Installation Test Equipment

for testing MSI NF750-G55 I used the following hardware and software:

test equipment

AMD Phenom II X2 550 see

Zalman Fan LED CNPS9900A

MSI Motherboard NF750-G55

Graphics Card GeForce 8200 (integrated)

Sound Card Integrated

Memory Kingston HyperX DDR3 1333 2 x 2GB (7-7-7-18)

Hard disk Seagate ST3320620AS (SATA 2, 16MB, 7200rpm)

Power Supply Zalman ZM660-XT

Power Supply Zalman ZM660-XT

...

operating system and software

Operating system: Windows XP SP3

of the driver V1.0 BIOS

nForce 15.49

Benchmarks 3D Mark 06

PC Mark 05

Everest 4.5

SiSoftware Sandra Lite XII

Cinebench R10

SuperPi 1.5 XS MOD

HD Tune 2.55

Crystal DiskMark 2.2

Lightsmark 2008 (1280 × 1024)

FurMark 1.4 (1280 × 1024, NoMSAA)

in the real tests WinRAR 3.80

X264HD Benchmark 2.0

X3: Demo meeting

X3: Terran Conflict Rolling Demo

officers club Revolutionary Armed Forces Cry 2

DH Photoshop Benchmark

Other software CPU-Z 1.51

GPU-Z 0.3.5

VLC 1.0

Here are some screenshots of hardware I used:

in the graphics test I have a resolution of 1024 × 800 with the highest graphics settings.

bios

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

menu that interested me the most is, of course, the Cell Menu, where all the real important settings, at least you want to overclock your system. Although NF750-G55 can be considered mid-range motherboard offers many options for overclocking both the CPU and memory modules.

M-Flash program that is embedded in the BIOS is actually a single MSI motherboards. It's a clever little program that allows us to update the BIOS, even for backup and recovery of the old BIOS versions.

There is a menu called "User Preferences". It allows you to set different "profile" in the BIOS settings. This can come in handy if you want to quickly load the settings from overclocking for gaming sessions and the like.

BENCHMARKING STUDY PART 1

nForce 750a CPU performance of the chip within the margin of which I had hoped. However, memory tests came out a little short which surprised me, because it is usually a strong area with NVIDIA chips.

BENCHMARKING STUDY PART 2

reading and writing speed HD were very good, which means that they solved the problem with the NVIDIA drivers that caused hard disk to work slower than it should on older chipsets.

Real World testing

What attracted my attention over the results of the weak performance of the WinRAR test. My conclusion is that it must be due to memory problems noted above.

In the test chip GeForce 8200 IGP did not get any great results in 3D testing so it is easy to conclude that it should not be used for gaming. It has managed just fine for HD video playback though.

energy consumption of the system is really low, especially when operating in standby mode, which makes it a good choice if you're building a 24 / 7 system.

Overclocking Capacity

NVIDIA has made classic Overclocking AMD chipsets in the past, including the now almost mythical nForce 2 and nForce 4 platform. So what is the nForce 750a SLI overclocking abilities? Next screenshot says it all:

I was able to overclock the FSB to 264MHz (!), Which is actually a bit strange for me, I did not expect to be so "overclocking friendly" would be 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 shader respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

My first experience with the NF750 chipset is zadovoljstvo.MSI NF750-G55 is a very diverse motherboard. It can be used in a hardcore SLI high-end system or can be used as a base 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 capabilities are excellent and the same goes for povezivanje.Integrirana graphics solution is good, but not as powerful as some of the integrated chip that AMD / ATI offerings.

No comments:

Post a Comment