MSI A88X-G45 Gaming Motherboard Review

The MSI A88X-G45 Gaming is a handsome AMD A88X motherboard that sports a long list of features including triple graphics slots. That explains the 'Gaming' part of the name and as you would expect the A88X chipset means this MSI board supports the latest FM2+ range of Kaveri APU. There is no doubt that the MSI A88X-G45 Gaming is a fine looking motherboard. The feature set is extensive which goes some way to justify the £95 inc vat asking price. There is no doubt that this is one of the most expensive and fully loaded FM2+ boards you can buy today. Specification: CPU AMD Socket FM2+/ FM2 A-Series/Athlon Processors Chipset AMD A88X Main Memory Support four DDR3-1333/1600/1866/2133/2400 (OC) MHz. up to 64GB Max Supports Dual-Channel mode Supports non-ECC, unbuffered memory Supports AMD Memory Profile (AMP) Supports Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) With this model MSI includes a voucher for Assassin's Creed Liberation HD (worth £16 on Steam), and as a result the box carries a large picture of Aveline, the lead character from that game. When it comes to accessories you get next to nothing. In addition to the I/O shield, manual and driver disc there are four SATA cables which are straight at one end and have a 90 degree angle at the other. Initial impressions of the A88X-G45 Gaming are positive. The PCB is black with highlights of red on the chipset and power regulation heatsinks. It is an attractive board although it seems every motherboard company are using the same colours this year. You can see the main features that consist of three long PCI Express slots, three PCI Express x1 slots and one legacy PCI slot. Between the APU socket and the micro buttons there are four DDR3 slots but you don't get any colour coding to work out the channels. I like to see the memory slots marked as two pairs. This business of populating slots and 2 and 4 before 1 and 3 can be confusing and it would have been nice to see two of the memory slots in red and the other in black to identify the pairing clearly - instead MSI make you reach for the manual to get the information. Along the side of the board there are eight SATA 6Gbps connectors that are native to the A88X chipset and which support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. These connectors are laid down horizontally so even though they are in line with the graphics slots you'll have no problem plugging in the cables. In the corner of the board there are three micro buttons and a couple of flick switches that play a major part in the make-up of the A88X-G45 Gaming. I will cover them in some detail shortly. MSI has arrayed a line of headers across the foot of the board for HD Audio and USB 2.0 which is pretty much what you expect. MSI has also placed a USB 3.0 header at the foot of the board. Every modern case has its USB ports at the top of the front panel so the cables have some distance to reach. The other thing to consider is that the header is directly in the way of the third graphics slot. I don't think it likely that anyone will install triple graphics cards in this motherboard but if MSI wants to offer the option it seems a bit silly to plonk the USB 3.0 header in that location. The I/O panel is absolutely packed with ports and connectors. There are two USB 2.0, six USB 3.0, one PS/2, 7.1 audio with S/PDIF, the Gigabit Killer E2205 Ethernet port and a host of graphics outputs. You get one each of VGA, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort. To get the most from the HDMI you need to use an FM2+ APU. I am not the least bit clear why MSI has included a VGA output although it might come in handy if you have an old projector you wish to connect. It may not be especially obvious that the dragon motif on the chipset heatsink is repeated in the profile of the power regulation heatsinks. You have to take a close look and squint a bit but yes, it does indeed look dragon-y. You will note there is a heatpipe joining the two heatsinks together. I tested the A88X-G45 Gaming with an AMD Kaveri A10-7850K that costs £132 inc VAT. This is a 95W TDP part and I could very easily have used a large cooler such as the Noctua NH-D15 but instead opted for a Noctua NH-L12 cooler that costs £45. This is a low profile cooler with a 120mm main fan and the option of adding a 92mm secondary fan below the heatsink. To my mind a highly integrated APU is a natural choice for a small form factor PC, rather than a large tower with the space for a huge cooler so I plumped for the NH-L12. When it came to system memory I had a simple decision as MSI sent me a kit of Radeon R9 DDR3-2400MHz while AMD sent me a second kit with the A10-7850K so naturally I chose the 16GB kit (£162) over the 8GB kit (£72). Here is a closer look at the control buttons that I mentioned. The Power and Reset buttons speak for themselves while the Slow Mode switch is a fail safe for underclocking to get your PC running when you are using extreme settings with LN2. The OC Genie button is a superb device that MSI developed to simplify overclocking, You simply turn off the PC, press the OC Genie button, start the PC and wait a couple of seconds while the BIOS loads an overclocking profile that is matched to your APU and memory. You can achieve exactly the same end by entering the BIOS set-up screen and selecting OC Genie there instead. Next to the OC Genie button there is a flick switch that selects the level of overclocking. Gear 1 lights up a blue LED while Gear 2 is indicated by a red LED. I cannot find any information about the level of overclocking that you can expect to see but in the case of my A10-7850K the stock upper speed was raised from 4.0GHz to 4.25GHz (blue) and 4.5GHz (red). My first task was to download the latest BIOS v1.1 on another PC, copy it to a USB drive and then use the M-Flash option in the BIOS to update. This was very quick and easy. The UEFI set-up screen is a peach. The layout makes the most of your Full HD screen and the mouse and keyboard control are excellent and I had no problem navigating my way around, almost as though I was in Windows. I doubt many people will install more than four SATA drives in their PC so six SATA connectors is plenty and eight native connectors is more than adequate. With most motherboards this is the point where I start to dive into the overclocking options. MSI gives you a decent range of tools and settings to work with but OC Genie is the only tool you need, unless you have some radical plans for overclocking your Kaveri. The hardware monitor in the BIOS is superb and makes it very easy to see what the temperatures and fan speeds are doing inside the PC. I pulled the minimum fan speed down to 25 percent, left the maximum speed at 100 percent and didn't have to make any other changes. I spent almost no time in the BIOS set-up screen. The default options all work properly and as I was overclocking with OC Genie I didn't have any work to do, which makes a very pleasant change from pretty much any other motherboard I have worked with. Once I had installed Windows 7 I ran the MSI driver disc and installed chipset drivers. This single driver pretty much completed the installation with the exceptions of the Killer E2205 NIC and the add-in VIA USB 3.0 controller, thanks to the highly integrated nature of the AMD APU. Once I had installed the Killer NIC driver and software (they are integrated in a single package) I got busy with Windows Updates. At times this process seemed a bit slow so I had a look at the Windows Task Manager and was surprised to see the CPU was flogging itself fairly hard to install the updates. Once your MSI motherboard is up and running and connected to the Internet the next job is to install MSI Live Update. The disc came with version 5 which installed and immediately offered me an update to version 6. I accepted and the software … vanished. Simply refused to make an appearance. Nowhere to be seen. I uninstalled Live Update, reinstalled from the driver disc, refused the update to version 6 and bingo, version 5 behaved perfectly. With Live Update installed you can be confident your BIOS, drivers and MSI utilities will be maintained without any effort but it's a bit of an irony when Live Update updates itself and then suffers from a problem. My test system consisted of the MI A88X-G45 motherboard with AMD A10-7850K APU, a Noctua NH-L12 cooler and 16GB of dual channel AMD R9 DDR3-2400MHz memory. Other parts of the system were a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD (£216) and a Be quiet! Straight Power 400W PSU (£59.99). I ran a selection of benchmark tests on the MSI A88X-G45 Gaming using three different settings. First Set: default speeds with the APU at 3.7GHz that boosts to 4GHz with the memory running at 1866MHz. Second Set: OC Genie Gear 1 with the APU at 4.25GHz and the memory at 2166MHz. Third Set: I used Gear 2 with the APU at 4.5GHz and the memory at its full speed of 2400MHz. It is worth emphasizing that I didn't make any changes to the BIOS so the initial PC build was very quick and the configuration was as simple as I could have hoped. I suffered just one single problem when Media Espresso crashed during the final test with hardware acceleration disabled. That is a minor problem as you wouldn't have much reason to use that particular piece of software without hardware acceleration. 3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance. Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good. To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.” There are minor gains to be achieved by overclocking the processor and memory, as shown in the results above. PCMark 8 is the latest version in Futuremark's series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of PC, from tablets to desktops. With five separate benchmark tests plus battery life testing, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance. PCMark 8 is the complete PC benchmark for home and business. At stock speeds the system performed well. A PC Mark 8 score of 4,453 comfortably beats the Gigabyte P35K Core i7 laptop that I recently reviewed. Overclocking increased the score to 4,584 and then 4,714 marks which isn't a massive increase - but is worth having. If you build a Kaveri PC using the MSI A88X-G45 it will make mincemeat of day-to-day tasks such as email, web browsing and all the Microsoft Office stuff your kids have to use for homework. CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free. Cinebench initially shows a 3.58 score, which can be improved to a maximum of 4.21 by overclocking to 4.5ghz with memory speeds set at 2,400mhz. Well worth overclocking the hardware if you want to do some light 3D rendering. CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats. Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology. New and Improved Features Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously. Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention. Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices. Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment. Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A. Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier. We are using the latest 6.7 version of the benchmark today. We convert a 3.3GB MKV to Apple iPhone format at 1280x720 resolution. Hardware acceleration is enabled. The most noticeable gain is when we overclock to 4.25ghz and increase the memory speeds to 2,166mhz. Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. However, the "Colin McRae" tag has been completely removed from this iteration (having previously been removed from only American versions of previous games in the series). We tested at 1920x1080 with 2x MSAA and medium settings enabled. Average frame rates improved most noticeably when we overclocked to 4.25ghz. The move to 4.5ghz delivered another single average frame rate of performance. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. We tested the game with the 'normal preset' at 1920x1080. The game wasn't perfectly playable at any of the settings, as the frame rate was running close to the minimum smooth rate of 25 fps. Overclocking the system to 4.5ghz however proved worthwhile, as the minimum frame rate increased to 24 from 21 at 3.7ghz and 23 at 4.25ghz. We tested system power consumption via a calibrated wall meter. The monitor is not factored into the overall figure, just draw from the main system itself. The AMD A10-7850K that I used is a 95W TDP part. During my 3D Mark testing the power draw at the mains socket varied from 70W-100W at stock speeds. Cinebench 11.5 delivered some rock solid figures and I could see that at stock speeds the system drew 104W, rising to 130W at 4.25GHz and 158W at 4.5GHz. The vast majority of the power draw is the APU as the only other components to consider are the system memory and the Samsung SSD. During my tests the MSI A88X-G45 was effectively silent, thanks to the Noctua NH-L12 which never made an audible noise above 30dBA, even when the APU was overclocked. It was a similar story with the Be quiet! Straight Power 400W PSU, where I could see the fan rotating but was unable to hear any noise. The system was effectively silent.You will have noticed that I haven't discussed the PCI Express side of the MSI A88X-G45 and the support for 3-way Crossfire. This is a crucial question and takes us to the heart of the AMD vs. Intel debate. If you buy an Intel CPU you get fairly weak integrated graphics capabilities but you don't have to make a decision about the CPU socket on your motherboard as LGA1150 is the only game in town. By contrast AMD presents you with a binary choice. Do you want a powerful (and power hungry) CPU in which case you choose AM3+ and set a budget for one, two or three graphics cards. Alternatively you choose FM2+ and buy a relatively pricey APU which has limited CPU power, but offset by a decent graphics core. Overall I like the A10-7850K and feel it is a viable opponent against, say the £144 Intel Core i5-4570S that runs at 2.9GHz-3.6GHz with a 65W TDP. The Core i5 is a safe bet but if I go down the £132 Kaveri route I want to avoid using a graphics card. I might, possibly, install an R7 240 or 250 to add extra graphics outputs but there is no way I will use dual or triple graphics slots. The test sheet that came with the MSI A88X-G45 showed that MSI had run this board with a £300 GTX 680 graphics card and I simply do not understand how this makes any sense. The consequence of my way of thinking is that I don't want an FM2+ motherboard to be ATX but instead would choose Micro-ATX. It would be going too far to specify Mini-ITX as Kaveri requires a decent cooler and that requires a certain amount of space - so Micro-ATX is the choice for me. The test system I assembled was good but was far from cheap. Take the components I have listed and add in the cost of Windows and a reasonable case and the total is around the £850 mark. Of course I could save some cash by choosing 8GB of RAM and I could have reduced the capacity of the Samsung SSD to leave a bit of budget for a storage HDD but none of this hardware is particularly inexpensive. I was impressed with the quality of the MSI A88XG45 and the superb OC Genie function which delivers very high, and stable overclocks. The board is also loaded with an extensive feature set. MSI do charge £95 inc vat for the A88X-G45 Gaming however, making it one of the most expensive FM2+ boards on the market today. Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE. Pros: OC Genie overclocking. Superb BIOS set-up. A list of features as long as your arm including six USB 3.0 and eight SATA 6Gbps. Full set of graphics outputs. Impressive gaming performance for an APU system. Live Update 5 does an excellent job of maintaining the BIOS and drivers. Cons: ATX form factor. Unnecessary support for triple graphics cards. High price for what should be a budget PC build. Live Update 6 didn't behave in our tests. KitGuru says: MSI have over-engineered the A88X-G45 Gaming to deliver the best possible feature set and overclocking performance. You will have to pay handsomely to own one however.

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MSI A88X-G45 Gaming Motherboard Review

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