Product Listing

An Average Joe - MSI 785GM-E51

By Vincent Chang - 26 Oct 2009

BIOS Settings & Test Setup

BIOS Settings

There was nothing fancy about the BIOS on the MSI 785GM-E51, just the standard MSI implementation, with some of the vendor's proprietary technologies like GreenPower and M-Flash. It's a rather straightforward and easy to use BIOS, with a touch of overclocking thrown in that we have seen previously on MSI's AMD boards. This includes a BIOS auto-overclocking tool (Max FSB) that works, but not all the time, and a useful multi-step OC Booster, which allows users to determine when to apply any overclocked settings, e.g. at POST, or after the OS loads , etc.

While we did not try to overclock the base clock of the system, we did push the integrated graphics core clock on the MSI to see how far it could go. The answer was a decent 750MHz, up from the default 500MHz. It was not the best (we hit 1000MHz on the Gigabyte GA-MA785GPM-UD2H) but at least higher than others like the ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO.

Some of the other more important BIOS settings:

  • CPU Frequency: 200 - 600MHz
  • CPU Ratio: x4 - x15 (0.15x steps)
  • PCIe Frequency: 100 - 150MHz
  • GPU Core Clock: 100 - 999MHz
  • Memory Ratio: 1:2, 1:2.66, 1:3.33, 1:4
  • CPU Voltage: 0.988 - 1.976MHz (0.001V steps)
  • Memory Voltage: 1.50 - 2.42V (0.05V steps)
  • NB Voltage: 1.108 - 1.337V (0.0025V steps)
  • SB Voltage: 1.228 - 1.472V (0.0025V steps)

Test Setup

We had compared three AMD 785G motherboards previously and hence, will be adding the results for those boards to our MSI 785GM-E51 results. The same system setup is used for the MSI board, including an AMD Athlon II X2 250 processor (3.0GHz) and others which are documented as below. Note that memory support among the motherboards as well as compatibility varied, thus the varied memory settings used as documented:-

  • AMD Athlon II X2 250 (3.0GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333, 7-7-7-20 (MSI 785GM-E51)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 1066, 7-7-7-20 (ECS A785GM-M)
  • 2 x 1GB Patriot DDR3-1866 @ 1333, 7-7-7-20 (ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 5-5-5-16 (Gigabyte GA-MA785GPM-UD2H)
  • Integrated GPU Memory size set to 256MB
  • AMD SB Driver version 8.631 and Catalyst driver 8.631 for AMD 785G motherboards
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • LG GGW-H20L Super Multi Blue Blu-ray Disc Rewriter & HD DVD-ROM
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)
  • CyberLink Power DVD Ultra version 8.0.2021.50

The following benchmarks were used to test the AMD 785G motherboards here:

  • BAPco SYSmark 2007 (with Patch 3)
  • Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
  • AquaMark3
  • Unreal Tournament 3 (Ver 1.1)
  • Quake 4 (ver 1.3)
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