MSI 790FX-GD70 and Phenom II 955BE
After some heavy benchmarking, today we can proudly present the results of the new MSI 790FX-GD90 and the new Phenom II 955 Black Edition. While we could have released the board review much earlier, MSI invested some time and listened to our comments regarding the BIOS and finally they did it in a very good way.
With regards to Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition, there is nothing new to tell you. It's clocked 3200MHz and has additional DDR3 support and uses socket AM3 but it also works with DDR2 memory and fits to socket AM2+. Nothing else changed compared to the "older" Phenom II X4 940. The combo DDR3 and DDR2 support is a great idea as well as AM2+ backward compatibility.
Features:
AMD 790FX/SB750
4+1 phase integrated MOSFET VRM
Realtek ALC889
2x Realtek RTL8111DL PCIe Gb LAN controller
JMicro JMB322 SATA II RAID 0, 1 controller
VIA VT1315N PCIe Firewire controller
Fintek F71889FG super I/O controller
RTM880N clock generator
passive cooling of chipsets/VRM
8Mb BIOS, version 1.1, 1.2b4, 1.3b2, 1.3b3, 1.3b5, 1.3b6RC
Mainboard Revision: 1.00
Multimedia:
The most important changes happened the last year and starting this year with the x264 development. While you would expect they would optimize for the new i7 platform, they also did this for the new Phenom II. And the results speak for itself. It's the first time AMD can keep at the same pace as any Core 2 Duo/Quad. So software-optimizing does matter, but there are no other programs we are aware of they do optimizing for AMD, as you can see with CineBench R10. Of course Intel E7200 and E8400 are not triple-core, but to keep charts simpler, we did it this way. To make the comparability more fair, we decided that the Intel i7 series have to run with only their native cores and Turbo disabled.
3DMark & FarCry 2:
3DMark 2003 run at 1600x1200, 3DMark 2006 used defaults. As you can see, more CPU does not really help. AMD has positioned the Triple-Cores against Intel's Dual Core offers, and as you can see in FarCry2 the third CPU does help to keep Intel in check, even when this game is clearly not optimized for AMD.
AMD Phenom II X4:
With prices so low for any Phenom II, there is no reason not to consider buying one when you have to update your system. While the most efficient CPU is still the Intel Core 2 Quad 9000 series, in our opinion Phenom II X4 955 offers similar performance, especially with AMD optimized software. Also, it's much easier to overclock any Phenom II compared to Intel Core 2 Quads.
We do also do not recommend the Intel Core i7 series, because they also get extremely hot, they use more energy compared to their predecessors and the boards are very expensive. If you lucky you can gain additional value from Phenom II X3 Triple-Cores when the BIOS of some mainboard supports unlocking the fourth core. This works in many cases and can get you a great quad for the price of the three core. The only downside of Phenom II is the higher energy-consumption, but in idle mode they are very close to Intel. Triple-Cores are available for about €107,- while the cheapest Quad-Core costs about €148,-, you can find all the CPU prices here. Phenom II X4 955 with an overclock to a stable 3.8GHz is a great CPU for €225, and we can recommend it. Of course, we would be happier to see 4+GHz.
MSI 790FX-GD70:
For some time we did not see a real AMD high-end board. This board of course is not perfect as we have discussed in the layout section, but despite that, MSI really improved BIOS, even adding features after a product was already released making it fantastic. Of course DDR3 is still not that cheap compared to DDR2, but when planning to upgrade an old system and want to be future-proof, this board is a perfect choice. MSI offers the best analog VRM around, with highly integrated parts which increase costs but keeps power-consumption down.
We are not fans of annoying knobs and buttons, but the overclocking capabilities of this board speak for itself. Even with non-Black Edition CPUs you can get the virtual FSB in regions where you gain the most increase while still able to use Cool'n'Quiet to save power. All our overclocking results where achieved by only increasing CPU voltage, only above 300MHz you may be required to increase the CPU NB voltage, so even inexperienced overclockers are able to achieve good results.
The board is already available for about €158,- which is fair price for such a board.
We hope in future MSI will improve their layout, so a debug LED can also be used on Crossfire platforms and we hope to see an official BIOS which does unlock all X2 and X3s unofficially. We will keep you informed if that has happened with new BIOS versions. Besides that, there is no reason not to recommend this board.
