A Closer Look at the MSI 790FX-GD70
A Closer Look at the MSI 790FX-GD70
At first glance, the overall layout of the GD70 is very good. The ATX power connector, SATA ports and the IDE connector are all located at the edge of the motherboard, which is ideal. Both the six black SATA ports and IDE connectors are also mounted for 90 connections to ensure that long video cards do not obstruct them. The two additional blue SATA ports located near the sourthbridge heatsink may not be accessible depending on the PCIE-16x slots used, but this is not a big deal given that there are six additional ports at the edge of the board. The floppy connector is located in perhaps the worst possible location at the bottom left of the board, but given how popular floppies are nowadays, this is a forgivable offense. In many ways it is surprising to find these connectors on boards at all.
From a expansion slot perspective, see a jaw-dropping four PCI-E 16x slots, each double spaced. The prospect of having two video cards installed in a system often complicates the layout, but four makes obstructions almost unavoidable. We’ll take a much closer look at the video card layout of the GD70 in the “Hardware Installation” section of the review.
Moving on toward the top half of the board, we see the standard +12V CPU power plug location at the top-left of the board and both the CPU socket and DDR3 slots in the expected and fairly standard locations. In regards to clearance, there appears to be a fair amount of space around the socket but we’ll take a closer look at a tower heatsink install during the “Hardware Installation” section of the review.
MSI has provided a fairly large aluminum heatsink on the GD70. Unlike most boards that simply put a thin heatsink strip over the MOSFETS, MSI took advantage of the 790FX chipset location and simply extended one large heatsink over both the MOSFETS and the chipset.
The GD70 features a 4+1 phase VRM power design consisting of heatsink-cooled MOSFETs and high-quality sealed and shielded chokes. The capacitors used throughout the GD70 are high-quality solid capacitors from Nippon Chemicon. Like most “+1 phase” AM2+/AM3 boards, the additional phase is dedicated to the integrated memory/HT controller. In English, the 790FX-GD70 officially supports 140W CPUs, and shouldn’t have any difficulty handling heavily overclocked Phenom IIs.
Farther to the right, we have the usual non-alternating dual-channel memory slots, which support a total of 16GB of system memory. MSI has outfitted the GD70 with dual-phase power design for the memory, which is certainly nice to see. Most boards utilize only a single phase for the memory, and this should equate to a more stable delivery of power to the modules. Just like the CPU power, the “Phase Switching” feature allows one of the two phases to be shut-down to conserve electricity.
At the edge of the motherboard, there is nicely located 24-pin ATX power connector.
One of the coolest features that the GD70 brings to the table is the “OC Drive” dial. Quite simply, turn to increase the base clock frequency. The little square button to the right of the dial is the “safety” and must be pressed before adjustments can be made. Each click of the dial is the equivilant of 1MHz added to the base clock frequency of the system. This increment can be increased or decreased in the BIOS. One of the best things about this dial is that it requires no special software on the system. Simply turn and tweak! We’ll take a closer look at the “OC Dial” and will actually be putting it to use in the “Overclocking” section of this review.
Another interesting button that can be found at the bottom of the board is labeled “Green Power”. Activation of this switch causes the board to switch to a lower power mode by cutting some of the VRM phases on both the CPU and memory.
Like some of MSI’s other higher end AMD offerings, on-board power, reset and clear-CMOS buttons are also conveniently located at the bottom of the board. These are especially handy when running the board in a case-less environment. Another nice touch is a small on-board HDD activity LED just above the switches. This light is often overlooked but can be very handy when using quiet hard drives.
As mentioned earlier, the single IDE port and the six SATA ports controlled by the SB750 are present at the edge of the board at a 90 degree angle. This orientation is especially useful when using longer 10.5 inch video cards, and even more important with a board supporting four of them, like the GD70. The two blue SATA connectors farther behind on the board are controlled by the onboard JMicron controller, and likely wouldn’t be used unless the black SB750 ports were all occupied. Generally speaking, chipset based SATA/RAID controllers are typically a little quicker than onboard supplementary controllers found on higher end boards. None the less, it’s nice to have those extra ports should they be required.
We have no doubt in our minds that quite a few Folding@Home enthusiasts have eyed this board at one time or another due to its four full-size PCI-E slots. AMD’s enthusiast 790FX chipset is especially generous when it comes to PCI-Express lanes. Owners of the GD70 can take advantage of 16X/16X crossfire, or fill up all slots for a still very capable 8X/8X/8X/8X crossfire mode. Regardless of your configuration, buyers will be pleased to hear that none of the slots will need to operate in a degraded 4X mode like they sometimes are with 790GX series boards. Most modern graphics cards will not suffer much – if any – performance degradation when placed in an 8X slot. In our experience, 8X slots provide plenty of bandwidth when it comes to folding as well.
A single 1X PCI-E slot sits between the first two full length slots, as well as a pair of legacy PCI slots between the other couple of full-length slots. Another great benefit of having all of these PCI-E video card slots in the board is their backward compatibility with other PCI-E 1X and 4X and 8X cards. If you are not planning to stack the GD70 full of video cards, you could easily install your favourite PCI-E raid or sound card in one of the other full-length slots.
With seven expansion slots crammed into the GD70, there was bound to be at least a layout conflict or two. We’ll be getting into more detail in the “Hardware Installation” section, but should definitely call out that most cases only support a total of seven expansion cards. This may sound like a perfect match, but one must remember that dual-slot video cards occupy two slots and the bottom-most slot on the GD70 will not allow dual-slot cards in the majority of cases out there. Running the board in a case-less benchmarking environment makes this a pretty moot point, but if you were keen on cramming quad-crossfire 4890s in your case, you may have a challenge or two.
Another nifty feature in the GD70 is the two-digit POST code display just to the right of the slots. Although this is a feature most will never need to refer to, it can definitely come in handy when trying to diagnose POST issues. A listing of various codes can be found in the user’s guide, and as an added bonus, the display reads the CPU temperature once POST has completed. We should note that BIOS revision 1.3 or newer is required to display the CPU temperature on the display.
