An Average Joe - MSI 785GM-E51

With its updated integrated graphics core, AMD's 785G chipset has been embraced wholeheartedly by vendors looking to capitalize on its mainstream appeal. MSI for instance has four variants available and today, we'll be looking at an AM3 version, the MSI 785GM-E51.

By HardwareZone Team - 25 Oct 2009

Introduction

As most of the PC world counted down to the launch of Windows 7, analysts were predicting the likely surge in PC sales from the release of Microsoft's latest operating system. Most were upbeat and optimistic, fueled by positive reviews for Windows 7 and signs that the world economy is gradually getting back on track.

Hardware manufacturers too were timing their product launches for the magical October 22nd date. Now that Windows 7 has been officially launched, one can now look forward to a host of refreshed products, all running on the new OS. As for those who deal in components, like AMD, the company continued to drum the mainstream value of its processors. The semiconductor firm announced several new processors, predominantly low-power versions and more importantly, slashed the prices of certain models.

Seeing as that's about the only message AMD can tout, what with Intel's continued dominance of the performance and high-end segments, we don't blame the company for playing the same tune. Besides, there's certainly a market for the affordable triple and quad-core products that AMD has been hawking. For instance, pair them up with a decent chipset like AMD's 785G or 790GX and one gets a system that is more than adequate for HD multimedia content, with some basic gaming on the side.

It's definitely not for everyone, but for those who are going the budget route, it's worth considering. Here to widen your choices even more, we're looking today at one such motherboard based on the AMD 785G chipset, the micro-ATX (mATX) MSI 785GM-E51, which is a AM3 version that uses DDR3 memory and throws in some of MSI's own proprietary technologies to jazz things up a little.

The MSI 785GM-E51

A familiar blue and black color scheme is used on a brown PCB, which is typical of MSI's recent motherboards. The MSI 785GM-E51 is an AM3 board sporting DDR3 memory slots, so only the newer AM3 processors are compatible since these CPUs have the integrated DDR3 memory controller. The standard four DIMM slots support up to 16GB of memory, with a maximum speed of 1600MHz (via overclocking of course). This memory speed is reflected in the memory settings in the BIOS.

A fairly typical rear I/O panel on the MSI, with the HDMI, VGA and DVI trinity of outputs complemented by an eSATA port and the usual USB, LAN and audio connectors.

Like all AMD 785G boards, the Southbridge is the SB710, which provides six SATA ports and an IDE interface. On the MSI, only five SATA ports are usable, the last has been converted to the eSATA at the rear. A floppy connector is included, along with other older technologies like serial and parallel ports. Sounds like a plan if you have a need for legacy devices. Conversely, there's no option for FireWire on this board and though S/PDIF is provided, it's present as a onboard header and not as a rear output connector.

With one eSATA port at the rear, there are five SATA ports left, of which four are aligned at the edge facing outward. The last SATA port risks getting in the way of a dual-slot graphics card.

With IDE and floppy support, it's a bit crowded here, especially with the power connector located here too. However, it's hard to fault MSI since this is rather common for mATX designs.

While we have seen solid capacitors on all the AMD 785G motherboards that we have reviewed so far, the MSI 785GM-E51 breaks the trend. It's only partially using solid capacitors, mainly for the multi-phase power design for the processor, which probably needs that the most. However, it's still quite a surprise to find MSI apparently skimping here when its competitors have all gone for the quality option.

Surprisingly, MSI does not use solid capacitors throughout this board. Only the phase power design for the processor here comes with solid capacitors. No such luck for the rest of the board.

The board's expansion options are limited by its form factor, which is why there are only four slots. Installing a dual-slot graphics card into the PCIe 2.0 x16 slot is possible, but it will likely interfere with one of the SATA ports. At least the single PCIe x1 slot looks usable, with MSI making sure that the nearby heatsink does not block the slot.

As you may expect, expansion options are limited and besides the PCIe 2.0 graphics slot, there are only two PCI slots and one PCIe x1 that is just about usable with sufficient allowance from the nearby heatsink.

We have seen this Easy OC switch before from MSI and frankly, we weren't impressed then. Nothing seems to have changed as this switch is a throwback to an era when vendors had sparse BIOS settings where one can't tweak clock frequencies.

Finally, there's an attempt to introduce some enthusiast-oriented features like the Easy OC Switch, which is a hardware switch to increase the base clock by fixed intervals of 10, 15 and 20%. It's something that one can easily do within the BIOS, so we aren't sold on its usefulness. Among its other 'extra' features include a TPM module header and the usual GreenPower and Active Phase Switch technologies to improve power efficiency.

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)

Results - SYSmark 2007 Preview

Not having SidePort memory like some of its competitors did not prevent the MSI from scoring second in SYSmark 2007. To be fair, this system suite will hardly be affected by the extra 128MB of local graphics memory.

Results - Futuremark PCMark05 Pro

The SidePort issue however became quite prominent in PCMark05, especially the Graphics segment. Here was where the MSI and ECS boards fell behind and probably dragged down the overall score too. Besides the lack of dedicated graphics memory, the MSI performed admirably in the other areas, doing well in both the memory and hard drive segments.

Results - SPECviewperf 9.0

Similar to SYSmark, SPECviewperf 9.0 pegged the MSI at second spot. Though this benchmark taxes both the memory and graphics subsystems, it had heavier emphasis on the memory subsystem, thus MSI fared reasonably overall.

Results - Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks

Although synthetic gaming benchmarks are probably not the best reflection of how a system performs in reality, it does help us examine where they stand from a certain theoretical point of view. In this case, the SidePort memory issue cropped up clearly in these benchmarks, particularly in AquaMark3. One can see here how the CPU segment saw the MSI finishing second, yet the Graphics segment highlighted its weakness. In short, expect gaming performance to suffer slightly compared to its rivals.

Results - 3D Gaming Benchmarks

Not surprisingly, in our proper games, Unreal Tournament 3 and Quake 4, the MSI was on par with the ECS board, since both lacked SidePort memory. It's not a huge handicap by any means, since these boards barely made the grade at our settings and the differences boiled down to around a frame or so. However, if you're playing more casual games at lower settings, these differences will likely be more obvious in terms of absolute frame rates as well as overall playability of the games themselves.

HD Playback Performance

Next, our Blu-ray playback testing aimed to find out the CPU utilization while running a Blu-ray movie. We chose two movies, one encoded using H.264 and the other with VC-1. Like the other 785G boards, the CPU utilization was remarkably low on the MSI. One should have no issues with playing HD content on this board, provided that ATI Avivo HD is supported by the software of course.

Temperature

When it came to onboard temperatures, the MSI 785GM-E51 was not as cool as the ASUS, being on similar terms as the ECS. However, it was still almost 10 degrees Celsius better than the Gigabyte board, which counts for something.

Power Consumption

The MSI board topped this segment, with lower idle and peak power measurements. It's difficult to pinpoint the exact reason, but MSI's active phase switching technology and its GreenPower feature will obviously take the credit. However, one shouldn't forget the fact that the MSI has slightly less features (no SidePort memory, no FireWire controller) than other boards like the ASUS and these also help reduce its power consumption figures.

Conclusion

Although AMD appears to be heading towards six-cores in the near future, its consumer processors are treading water in the performance and enthusiast segments. The entry level quad-cores and low-power processors will retain a certain place in the market, with Intel's Core 2 series nearing the end of its life cycle. What will worry AMD are the future Lynnfield and Clarkdale processors expected to arrive early next year. In which case, even the AMD 785G chipset's performance may not be sufficient to halt the tide.

At the moment though, users have quite the choice when it comes to the AMD 785G chipset. The 780G created a decent amount of mindshare and the 785G builds on it. MSI and Gigabyte are examples of vendors that have invested heavily in the chipset, with multiple models available. The MSI 785GM-E51 is unfortunately not one of the manufacturer's stronger models and lacks some features that are found on its competitors, with SidePort memory probably the most significant omission. Of course, MSI has other models with such an option, like the MSI 785GM-E65.

A lack of SidePort memory is the clue that this MSI 785GM-E51 is meant for the real budget crowd. Mediocre performance and an ordinary feature set make for a very average board.

The MSI 785GM-E51's proposition hence lies in its pricing and the MSI-only technologies that it has. Locally, the MSI 785GM-E51 is available for around S$172, which is somewhat affordable, if not exactly entry-level pricing. Compared to the ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO which goes for S$188, the MSI is certainly slightly cheaper. It's not the same though, since the ASUS does have a better feature set but one can argue that MSI's unique features are probably worth something to certain users.

Personally, we find the power efficiency ones to be the best of the bunch while the overclocking ones to be extraneous when it comes to an integrated, mainstream board likethe AMD 785G. In short, there are more choices available out there so do the proper comparisons and get the one that fit your requirements closely. We did our sums and while the MSI 785GM-E51 is a decent board, it's probably not one that shines out from the competition when factoring all its aspects.

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