MSI 890GXM-G65 Review

Test Setup and Overclocking

Test Setup

AMD Phenom II X4 620 Processor
MSI 890GXM-G65
4GB G.Skill 2000MHz RAM @ 1333MHz
ASUS Radeon HD5850 Top
Cougar 1000CM 1KW PSU
Samsung Spinpoint F1
Corsair H50-1
Windows 7 64 Bit

Overclocking

Because we're not using a black edition processor today we're limited in the overclock we can achieve. The most surprising aspect is how quickly we hit the limit of the FSB, at 255MHz. With the CPU multiplier then increased and the bus speed reduced until we attained a fairly stable overclock, we reached 3263 GHz. This is the best we've yet seen out of our X4 620 CPU. Kudos to MSI for that.

A couple of our tests weren't happy with the one extra MHz on the Bus Speed, but lowering down to 250MHz allowed us to run our full battery of benchmarks, and so it is at this setting we will use for our overclocked tests.

Although the board has dipswitches available to increase the Bus Speed, this solely increases the Bus Speed without touching anything else, and doesn't really overclock it enough to bother testing. Although it definitely works, should you be morbidly afraid of the BIOS.