The Star of the Show
The MSI 890GXM-G65 may be a mere mATX board, but it at around $120 online, it isn’t “cheap” by any means. In fact, none of the 890GX boards are – all of the full ATX boards fall within the $140-150 range. This is noteworthy, because we know that they are not much different from 785G boards, which can be had as little as half the price. Is it worth paying 2X more for SATA 3.0? What do you think?
The question we have to ask MSI today is, does their mATX solution offer similar features to the full ATX boards, just in a smaller package? We of course know that it won’t have as many expansion ports, but if much else is lacking, MSI will have a tough time convincing people to buy this over a full ATX board from Asus or Gigabyte. We started seeing really good mATX boards from Abit three years ago, before they were bought out. Then they dropped the ball, and eventually died a painful death. Let’s see if MSI can come up with something better.
First, let’s take a look at the layout. Higher-res versions of all pics are available upon click.
First looking at the expansion port cluster, you can see that MSI offers full Crossfire support on this little mATX board, with automatic PCI-E lane switching (some boards require a card to be inserted to manually enable the second port). A major plus, and something we’ll see more often thanks to improved chipsets. These are supplemented by a single x1 slot, and a legacy PCI slot. I think they should have gone for an x4 slot, to make full use of what the chipset provides. This isn’t a huge issue though, considering there are very few x4 PCI-E adapters out there.
Also along the bottom are some audio headers (front panel, CD, and SPDIF, going from left to right) and the OCSWITCH1 switch. OCSWITCH1 is nothing more than a manual way to overclock the FSB by 10%, 15%, or 20%. Why you would want to do this using a switch and not in the BIOS, I am not sure. But it’s there, and it works fine.
Moving along the board, we see the odd-looking SATA port cluster. I guess MSI couldn’t decide whether they wanted to offer standard SATA ports, or edge mounted ports, so they gave us both. Personally, I think standard ports are much more suitable for mATX cases, as it is almost always a tight squeeze, and there is a huge potential for the edge-mounted ports to be blocked. Because it is an mATX board with dual graphics ports though, there aren’t many other choices for placement. I think it’s about time board manufacturers ditch the huge PATA slot; anyone buying a motherboard today is likely going to be using a SATA optical drive anyway.
Speaking of archaic ports, there is an LPT header sitting there, taking up space. If you are one of the few people who might need this on their mATX gaming/HTPC rig, you are going to have to find your own port for it though. Causing more old-school flashbacks is the front panel header MSI uses here – there is a rotated label printed on the PCB, but it is not colour-coded. This is a pet-peeve of mine. Thankfully, the rest of the headers are all lined up along the bottom of the board, making for a clean install of extra USB headers.
The area around the CPU is quite roomy, and I like the placement of the ATX headers – the 24-pin header is close to the edge of the board, while the 4-pin is at the top left corner, where it belongs.
The rear panel is well equipped for a mATX board. You get three video outputs, six USB ports (two of which are USB 3.0), and an optical SPDIF output (no digital audio inputs are available). There is even an E-SATA port, connecting to the SB850 Southbridge. This rear panel tells us that although this is a micro board, it’s by no means a low-end entry-level product.
However, despite the fact that this is a “mini enthusiast motherboard” (and costs over $120 right now), the usual ‘enthusiast extras’ are missing – no BIOS status LED, no power or reset buttons, standard PCB layers, no whacky coolers on the back of the CPU socket. As far as hardware design goes, the 890GXM-G65 is quite simply a well-designed mATX motherboard, with solid-caps all around and a nicely placed heatpipe cooler. So what does it have to offer on the inside? Let’s find out…
Great review! I like it a lot, mostly what I was looking at was the conclusion as I’m just about to buy that board. It is overpriced indeed, but funny fact is that I am actually sitting in the situation where I need “Crossfire 8x/8x support in a micro ATX form factor”, so thanks for confirming this!
Cheers
[...] contains a Radeon HD 4290 GPU. We first experienced this chipset March 2010 when we reviewed the MSI 890GXM-G65 motherboard. To call this a 1 year old chipset is somewhat misleading however, as the Northbridge is almost [...]