MSI 790GX-G65 Motherboard Review :: Layout

The MSI 790GX-G65 is a standard ATX form factor sized board meaning that you can fit it into any ATX sized cases. MSI has decided to use their famous red colored PCB with the 790GX-G65 board. The CPU Socket is on the top of the board with plenty of room to install after-market cooling on the board. Below the CPU Socket are four DIMM slots for DDR3 memory. The motherboard can take up to 16GB of DDR3-1333MHz (1600MHz if overclocked) memory.

MSI outfits this board with dual PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots. Note that the top slot is x16 while the bottom slot is x8. The 790GX chipset only supports 26 PCI Express lanes meaning that when two cards are installed one will operate in x8 x8 mode. There are also two PCI Express x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots on the board for expansion. Note that the use of two dual slot video cards will block a PCI Express x1 and a PCI slot. Under the top PCI Express x16 slot is an EZ OC Switch.

The board has five SATA ports on the bottom of the board below the first PCI Express x16 slot. Four of them are sideways facing meaning you can install or remove the cables without interference from a long video card like a GTX285 or Radeon HD 4870 x2 card. There is plenty of clearance for the fifth SATA port. The SB750 supports SATA RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 modes. The sixth SATA port is on the rear panel IO.

The 4-pin power connector is on the upper right hand corner of the board, allowing the power cable to be directly fed to the connector without going over the CPU cooler. The 24-pin power connector is on the bottom right hand corner of the board next to the IDE connector. Moving to the right we have the Front Panel Jumpers set 1 and 2. Rounding the corner of the board we have the Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons. Next to that are three USB headers.

Onboard audio is handheld by the venerable Realtek ALC889 CODEC that has been around for a couple of years. It is fully compliant with the Azalia 1.0 specification, has true Blu-ray audio support and supports ten DAC channels for 7.1 surround sound plus 2 channels of independent stereo sound output through the front panel stereo outputs.

One of the big selling points of this board is the onboard video. There is a 128MB SidePort memory chip on the board to provide framebuffer memory. Up to 512MB of main memory can be allocated to the onboard graphics. Note that if you want to allocate more than 256MB I would suggest at least 2GB of memory to be used on the system. The 790GX Northbridge is covered by a heatsink with a heatpipe leading to another heatsink covering the PWM area.

The rear IO on the board consists of a PS/2 Combo keyboard/mouse port, an optical S/PDIF port, a VGA port, a DVI port, an HDMI port, six USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire port, an eSATA port, a Gigabit LAN port and the six audio jacks for the onboard audio. Note that the DVI port is a DVI-D port and cannot handle DVI-I connections as it is missing four pin holes. If you want to install a HDMI monitor a connection is included.