MSI 970 Gaming Motherboard Review

Rating: 8.0.

As model names go, the MSI 970 Gaming sends a direct message in no uncertain terms. This motherboard uses an AMD 970 chipset that supports socket AM3+ and is aimed at punters who wish to build a PC using an AMD FX processor. The Gaming part of the name comes from the features that have been added to appeal to gamers, such as the Killer Gigabit NIC, Audio Boost 2, the Gaming Device Port and support for dual graphics cards in CrossFire or SLI.

Anyone building an AMD PC is probably looking for a way to keep their budget tight and the MSI 970 Gaming will doubtless pique their interest as it has a recommended price that is a mere £69.56 inc VAT.

Specification:

• CPU AMD Socket AM3+/AM3 FX Processors
• Chipset AMD 970 and SB950
• Main Memory
• Support four DDR3-2133(OC)/1866/1600/1333/1066 up to 32GB Max
• Dual-Channel memory architecture
• Supports non-ECC, unbuffered memory
• Supports AMD Memory Profile (AMP)
• Supports Extreme Memory Profile (XMP)

You cannot expect much in the way of a bundle of goodies when you pay £69.95 for a relatively high end motherboard, however MSI has done a good job of making it look like you get plenty of extras.

On the back of the red and black box you'll find a list of the main features of this model. Inside you get a printed manual, the I/O shield, two SATA cables and an SLI bridge cable. The pack of black and white labels are stickers that you use to identify the various cables inside your new PC.

It's a reasonable idea but not strictly necessary unless you have a bunch of hard drives and cannot figure out which is which.

The driver DVD deserves a mention simply because it looks like the sort of thing you'd make at home in your bedroom. It's, like, black. Two final items are a notice to hang on your bedroom door handle and a self-adhesive label that is presumably intended for your PC case.

The price of £69.95 inc VAT sounds absurdly low as the MSI 970 Gaming is a stylish piece of hardware that has no obvious signs of cost cutting.

It is a regular ATX design with dual graphics slots and three hefty aluminium heatsinks on the PWM 8 phase power hardware and both parts of the chipset. A quick look on the back of the board confirms the three heatsinks are each secured with two screws rather than those nasty plastic pop pins.

Take a step back to look at the bigger picture and you'll realise the 970 chipset is the junior member of the AMD 900 family and only supports dual PCI Express 2.0 slot for two way CrossFire or SLI. If you want three- or four-way graphics you need the 990FX chipset which means you'll be spending £80-£125 on your motherboard.

Apart from using the 970 chipset, MSI has kept costs down by leaving out any frivolous pieces of hardware. You can forget about Power and Reset micro buttons, and the same is true of a POST code debug display or a button for the OC Genie function. That's a sensible decision to keep the cost low.

In an ideal world you would ally your new AMD motherboard with some AMD Radeon R9 DDR3 memory. Apart from the fact that AMD R9 memory is supported by the AMP profile in the BIOS, you'll see in the photos that the colour scheme of the memory matches the MSI 970 Gaming to perfection.

While we appreciate cosmetic good looks we feel the smart black and red styling isn't especially helpful as there is a near-absence of colour coding or printed legends.

The front panel connectors are a case in point as they pretty much oblige you to reach for the manual if you want to plug things together correctly.

Take a look at the I/O panel and you might think it is a bit Spartan however there is plenty on offer. The absence of any graphics connectors means there is plenty of space, despite the fact that you get eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, one PS/2 and a full set of surround sound audio connectors. It doesn't look fancy but you get everything you need.

If you look behind the USB 3.0 ports you can see the tiny VIA VL806 chip that adds the USB 3.0 feature as the aged SB950 Southbridge is limited to USB 2.0.

In fact there are a couple of features worthy of note. The red PS/2 connector supports N-Key rollover keyboards that allow you to press three or more keys in very quick succession without getting a false input. Those two red USB 2.0 ports below the PS/2 support a 1000Hz polling rate (compared to the standard 125Hz rate for USB 2.0) which is intended to give the maximum response for your gaming mouse.

Many gamers are perfectly happy with a standard Gigabit Ethernet connection however the 970 gaming board comes with a Killer NIC that allows you to prioritise game traffic.

There is one annoyance in terms of the layout of the board and that relates to the eight-pin EPS power connector. It sits tight between the I/O connectors and the PWM heatsink and the thing is the wrong way round. When you connect your power supply cables you have very little working room to release the locking latch and will certainly require a screwdriver or some other tool.

MSI has done a fair amount of work on the audio side of things. The Realtek ALC1150 audio chip sits in one corner of the board under the Audio Boost 2 logo where it is protected by EMI shielding and surrounded by Japanese Nichicon capacitors for the audio circuit.

That wibbly wobbly line connecting the audio chip and the audio jacks is an LED path that lights up red when the system is running and appears to be a play on words for ‘audio path' rather than a technical feature. The red audio jack is a dedicated amplified output for headphones.

MSI Click BIOS 4 is a clunky name for the UEFI set-up screen that works very smoothly. Once you have hammered the Del key to enter set-up you can navigate Click BIOS 4 using either your mouse or keyboard. There are three enormous buttons on either side of the screen with an even larger MSI dragon logo in the middle.

M-Flash is the section where you update the BIOS using a USB flash drive, however our board arrived with the latest BIOS already installed.

Settings handles the basic stuff, such as where your SATA devices are connected however there is a more visual way of checking your hardware.

The Board Explorer button shows a picture of the motherboard and as you click on areas such as the memory, CPU, I/O panel or SATA you'll see how your PC is set up.

In some contexts this might seem like froth but the generic quick start guide tells you nothing worth knowing and the user manual could do with a photo or two to sit alongside the raft of line drawings. This makes Board Explorer a very useful way to check you have indeed plugged everything together correctly.

Hardware Monitor reports temperatures, fan speeds and voltages and gives you slider controls to adjust fan speeds and target temperatures.

No doubt you'll want to spend some time in the OC (Over Clocking) section of the BIOS. You'll find all of the settings that you expect to see however most of the voltage settings are relative rather than absolute. For example if you want to adjust the CPU voltage to 1.20V you first need to establish the current voltage and then add 0.20V to achieve the desired goal.

It's not exactly the slickest way to adjust your settings but it does work fairly successfully. On the plus side you don't actually need to change many of the settings to overclock an AMD FX, as we shall see in a short while.

MSI includes a fair amount of software with the 970 Gaming.


On the audio front the first layer of software comes as part of the Realtek ALC1150 drivers. These drivers pack in speaker configuration, sound effects and room correction and while it works well enough there are some curious things going on.

Look at the first screen grab and you'll see a row of four buttons that are short cuts for Sewer Pipe, Bath Arena, Stone Room and Auditorium sound effects. That's a curious selection.

MSI has ridden to the rescue with a package of Sound Blaster Cinema 2 software that shares the 970 Gaming black and red colour scheme. This software is skewed towards headphones and volume control and seems like a fine choice for gamers.

Another piece of software included in the package is the Killer Network Manager. The Killer LAN hardware is rated at 550MBps up and 450MBps down which is far higher than any Internet connection you are likely to be using. This means you are likely to want to control the software running on your PC and in particular to prioritise your gaming traffic.

This can save you from nasty surprises when a piece of software decides it is time to check for updates and causes the connection to stutter.

While the audio and network software are useful it is less clear that the MSI Control Centre adds much value. This is reporting software that copies information from the BIOS and gives you the ability to make changes within Windows, which might sound convenient, but this method is rarely as reliable as delving directly into the BIOS.

This software caused a spot of confusion as one of the features of the MSI 970 Gaming is the inclusion of OC Genie 4 which automates the process of overclocking. If you look at the second tab on Control Centre you'll see it activates OC Genie II.

The curious result of using OC Genie II was that the speed of the FX-8350 CPU was cut in half from 4.2GHz to 2.1GHz. This seemed unlikely however a quick run of 3D Mark Fire Strike showed the score dropped from 7,904 marks on standard clock speeds to 5,728 when ‘overclocked' with OC Genie II. It was the Physics score that took the hit, dropping from 7,787 to 4,070 marks.

The moral of this tale is that you might use Control Centre for information but if you want performance you need to work in the BIOS.

The test system used for testing the MSI 970 Gaming used an AMD FX-8350 CPU which is 8-core with a base speed of 4.0 GHz and a Turbo Boost to 4.2GHz. Added to that we have 16GB of dual channel AMD Radeon R9 DDR3-2400MHz RAM, a Sapphire Radeon R9 290 4GB graphics card and 500GB Samsung 840 SSD, running on 64-bit Windows 7.

To keep the FX-8350 cool we used an Alpenfohn Wasser which is a fairly generic 120mm liquid cooling system. In addition it was necessary to have a case fan drawing cool air across the passive coolers on the PWM and Northbridge as these heatsinks can get uncomfortably hot.

When the system started the memory ran at a default speed of 1,866MHz so the first step was to enable the AMP profile that raised the memory speed to 2,133MHz. After that a series of benchmark tests showed the MSI 970 Gaming did a decent job and performed without any problems or glitches. If you glance back at our recent review of the FX-8370E where we used the FX-8350 as a baseline you can see how the ASRock 990FX Killer that was used in that system fared in comparison.

If you pick and choose your benchmark results you will see the MSI 970 Gaming loses out by a tiny margin to the 990FX. For example in PC Mark 8 the MSI 970 scores 4,601 while the 990FX scores 4,690 and in 3D Mark the Cloud Gate score rises from 19,745 to 19,814.

In practice these figures are identical and demonstrate that the basic 970 chipset delivers the same level of CPU and memory performance as the more expensive 990FX.

With the FX-8350 benchmarked at 4.0 GHz it was time to get busy overclocking, which is usually a simple process with an MSI motherboard.

The MSI 970 gaming supports OC Genie 4 which is a hardware feature on high end models where you press a button on the board to enable the feature. The procedure is different with the MSI 970 Gaming as there is no OC Genie button.

Instead you enter the set-up screen for the Click BIOS 4 and there, at the top left of the screen, you'll see a picture of a button labelled OC Genie. You probably missed it in the earlier screenshots of the BIOS but here it has been clicked and has lit up in blue.

When you use OC Genie an MSI overclocking profile is loaded in the BIOS which means we are able to see exactly what changes have been made and the fact is that there isn't a great deal to report. The CPU ratio was changed from 20x to 21x, Turbo was disabled, RAM speed was set at 1,866MHz and the fan speed was cranked to 100 percent.

It is interesting to note that MSI left the voltages on stock settings but these are timid steps that simply mean the FX-8350 runs at 4.2GHz at all times, instead of allowing the CPU to clock back to 4.0GHz.

The results of this  overclock are entirely predictable. If we look at the CPU test in Cinebench the score rises from 6.75 points to 7.20 points, a rise of 6.7 percent.

On the other hand the reduction in memory speed from 2,133Mhz to 1,866Mhz reduces memory bandwidth from 21GB/second to 18GB/second.

Manually overclocking the FX-8350 requires a small amount of work in the MSI Click BIOS. Increasing the Northbridge voltage from 1.1V to 1.2V was easy, however raising the CPU by +0.3V caused the PC to freeze during POST. MSI has included a flick switch that forces the 970 Gaming to enter Slow Mode and allows you to recover to the BIOS without clearing the CMOS.

Reducing the CPU voltage to +0.20V sorted things out and then it was a matter of enabling the AMP memory profile, raising fan speeds, disabling Turbo and increasing the CUP multiplier to deliver more power.

Raising the speed to 4.4GHz, 4.6GHz and then 4.8GHz was easy and delivered a healthy slug of extra performance. This is reflected in all of the benchmark results and is shown very neatly in Cinebench.

At 4.4GHz the score was 7.3 points (barely higher than 4.2GHz), at 4.6GHz it was 7.9 points and at 4.8GHz it was 8.2 points. To sum that up, at stock speed the FX-8350 scored 6.8 points which rose by 20 percent to 8.2 points when overclocked to 4.8GHz.

Clearly, you might think, those overclocking figures demonstrate that MSI was horribly cautious when it set OC Genie 4 to overclock by such a pathetic handful of MHz. Well you might think that but there is method to MSI's apparent madness. The problem is that FX-8350 is a power-hungry CPU. At idle the test PC drew 80W at the wall socket which rose to 215W in the Cinebench CPU test. This is a rise of 135W, which is pretty much want you expect when a 125W TDP processor is working hard.

With OC Genie 4 enabled and the clock speed increased to 4.2GHz we saw the idle power draw rise to 100W and loaded power increase slightly to 220W. In other words OC Genie 4 has very little impact on power requirements, thanks to the use of stock voltage settings.

Manual overclocking revealed a completely different picture. At 4.4GHz the idle power draw was 145W and the loaded figure was 310W. That is a huge jump from the stock figures and makes decent cooling essential to avoid problems. The idle figure remained at the same level as we increased clock speed to 4.6GHz and then 4.8GHz, however the loaded figure stepped up to 320W and then 335W.

That's a hefty amount of power, and an obvious cost to the consumer, but the main consequence is that extra power inevitably results in extra heat.

As the power and clock speeds increase so too does the temperature of the CPU package and core. To take the extreme cases, at stock speed the package temp is 40 degrees and the core temp is 58 degrees. By any standards those are reasonable figures, especially when you consider they were observed with the cooling fans running in the range of 25-50 percent.

By contrast when the CPU was overclocked to 4.8GHz the figures increased to 64 degrees for the package (an increase of 18 degrees) and the core temp was 77 degrees (an increase of 19 degrees), and that was with the cooling fans running at full speed.

The MSI 970 Gaming motherboard looks very smart in appearance with a colour scheme that is mainly black with a hint of red. This has a downside as the board is slightly more complicated to set up than we would like, thanks to the absence of colour coding or helpful printed legends next to the connectors. Provided you refer to the manual you are unlikely to run into any problems.

The only howler in terms of the design or layout is the eight-pin EPS connector which is awkward to unlatch. Ideally it would be rotated 180 degrees or, better yet, the PWM heatsink would be profiled to improve access.

The list of features supplied by the 970 + SB950 chipset is little more than basic and doesn't include PCI Express 3.0 or USB 3.0, however the performance of this board is perfectly acceptable with a grunty FX-8350 in the AM3+ socket.

MSI has sprinkled some goodies on the 970 chipset in the shape of the Killer NIC, VIA USB 3.0 controller, Sound Blaster Cinema 2 software and red connectors for gaming peripherals.

Balanced against that the MSI Control Centre and MSI Command Centre utilities are not especially useful. When you look at the I/O panel you'll find eight USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports, which is pretty generous.

The biggest disappointment about the 970 Gaming is that the power hungry nature of FX-8350 has forced MSI to restrict OC Genie 4 to a tiny level of overclocking that is effectively useless.

Happily the Click BIOS is very good and makes it a simple matter to raise the speed of the CPU, provided you are willing to deal with the resulting power draw and unwelcome levels of heat. The only change that would markedly improve the Click BIOS would be a shift from relative settings such as +0.20V to absolute figures.

This is a decent piece of hardware that delivers solid performance at a low price and the fact it is built on three year old technology is completely out of MSI's hands.

You can pre-order from SCAN in the United Kingdom for £69.56 inc vat.

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Pros:

• Low price
• Backwards support for AM3 and AM3+ processors
• Killer Gigabit NIC
• Sound Blaster Cinema 2 software
• Gaming peripheral ports
• Support for dual graphics cards
• Smart styling
• Effective Click BIOS is easy to navigate using a mouse
• Solid performance

Cons:

• AMD 970 chipset does not support USB 3.0
• OC Genie 4 barely overclocks the FX-8350 CPU
• The passive coolers require a decent amount of air flow to avoid problems
• Poor positioning of the EPS power connector

KitGuru says: If you're in the market for a gaming PC built on AMD hardware, the MSI 970 Gaming offers you very good value for money.

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