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MSI 890FXA GD70 Motherboard review

Encoding is something most of us do on a fairly regular basis and it is a good way to monitor any fluctuations in performance across the range of motherboards on test today.

One of our favourite tools is the excellent, free Handbrake.  HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

We extracted a VOB file from the DVD of AVATAR and then converted it to MP4 at quality settings.

The results show that the MSI board actually performs faster than the Gigabyte with handbrake conversion, by around 8 seconds. We were disappointed to see the Asrock board take considerably longer. This would hardly be noticeable by the ‘average' user, but if transcoding/encoding was a primary task for your system you could save time by opting for the MSI board.

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress is easy to use, yet has a deep set of options for advanced encoding techniques. It is also full of editing features to enhance or alter your video clips before converting. We used the latest 4.7.6.304 for our testing today. We converted an AVATAR MPEG2 to MPEG4 and recorded the time taken.

Again we get the best results from the MSI board today with a 4 second differential over the 14-15 minute time frame.

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10 comments

  1. I own Intel, but I do think that AMD get better motherboards. look at the current state of slot 1156 motherboards for instance. cant get two with x16 !

  2. Wow, this was better than I thought it would be, ive never rated MSI.

  3. Wow, this was better than I thought it would be, ive never rated MSI.

  4. Interesting to see power consumption figures, wish you had did that for the GTX465 review. Bet they were bad bad bad

  5. AMD motherboards are great, just wish Intel made the CPUs for them :p

  6. Sebastian Cruckshanks

    Great review, gotta say tho, those miltitary grade capacitors. thats bollocks. Are we meant to believe MSI are getting them from the airforce or something?

  7. It is nt funny how no matter how good a board is, the makers always do smoething stupid? that sata port for instance …. oops!

  8. Shame we didnt see the asus board in the mix, its the best one of them all. would be interesting to see performance with it

  9. Fab board this, shame its not intel slot though !

  10. The overall quality of AMD motherboards seems to be higher. the 890FX chipset is brilliant however.

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