MSI 890FXA-GD70 Review
Test Setup and Overclocking
Published: 18th June 2010 | Source: MSI | Price: £163.44 |
Test Setup and Overclocking
As this is a higher end motherboard than the G65 we're upping the ante by using the fantastic 1090T.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Processor
MSI 890FXA-GD70
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
Before we start it's worth mentioning that the BIOS is identical to that on the G65, and so we have spared you repeating those shots as you can slip across to that review if you want to see them.
Overclocking on the GD70 was a very simple affair thanks to the always intuitive BIOS. Firstly we wanted to make sure we kept our voltages at levels that you could run 24/7. There is no use in creating an unrealistic environment purely for the sake of "look at us" scores. We'd much rather show you what you could replicate without having a bucket of LN2 and a defibrillator handy.
Firstly we wanted to find the highest possible Bus Speed. Thanks to the unlocked capabilities of the 1090T we could do this easily by dropping the multiplier to make sure we aren't CPU or RAM limited. We finally topped out at a not inconsiderable 282MHz. There is clearly enormous potential in this board if you can harness all that.
Secondly we wanted to find the highest overclock that we could run in a stable manner. We ended up, after a suitable period of trial and error, at 4.256 GHz. Very impressive indeed. This happily ran all of our tests without a problem, right until we reached POV-Ray. This started giving us exception errors, despite all our other tests passing happily.
Despite much tweaking eventually we ran out of time and so had to drop down to a speed that would pass POV-Ray. We were very tempted to run POV-Ray at a lower speed and retain our 4.2 GHz overclock for the rest but consistency throughout our tests is vital. So with a small drop to just under 4 GHz we re-ran and this is the speed we'll be using for our testing today.
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