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Published in Reviews

MSI and ECS 785G tested

by on21 October 2009

Index




Both boards had their difficulties to match the nominal speed. While we could convince MSI to fix the clock programming, we are not so fortunate with ECS, their board does slightly underclock.


MSI 785GM-E65
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Elitegroup A785GM-M
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While the MSI board supports 128MB DDR3, Elitegroup thought they can save $0.80 and do overclock the IGP by 200MHz. The downside is, that they also over-voltage the IGP by 0.05V. The latest GPU-z could not handle the Elitegroup board, so we had to use a previous version to get a valid screenshot. The DKA790GX is clocked with 700MHz and doesn't support sideport memory.

MSI 785GM-E65
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Elitegroup A785GM-M
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MSI DKA790GX
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Overclocking MSI 785GM-E65:

As you can expect from MSI overclocking the CPU is a no brainer. But as you can imagine, this board was not designed to allow top notch overclocking. We managed 3.77GHz which is only 0.07GHz shy of what our CPU can do. With 1.4625VCore we achieved a stable overclock.

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The IGP is not going very high. Because due to a design problem, IGP voltage and HT link voltage are linked, so increasing one, also increases the other. We increased the IGP to 1.226V which results in over 1.32V for the HT which is quite high. But we ony got a mere 750MHz

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Overclocking Elitegroup A785GM-M:

The Elitegroup was able to boot up with even 3.84GHz, but during our Prime95 test, even the core-temperatures exceeded 80°C so we had to abort the test. We used 222MHz reference clock to end up with 3.77GHz at +75mV VCore. The BIOS does feature a CPU Frequency control, but enabling it caused the board to fail booting, regardless of the settings. Also we noticed elevated CPU temperatures, but we are not sure if the board shows correct temperatures. We also noticed a quite high voltage drop of about 0.035V which is atypical for AMD boards.

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The IGP is already overclocked to 700MHz, but we still managed to get it to 900MHz with 140mV more voltage for the IGP. The cooler is not really suited for such high clocks, so we advice to use an additional fan.

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Undervoltaging:

While the whole CPU frequency is broken with our latest beta-BIOS, Elitegroup is not able to undervoltage any CPU. On the MSI board, undervoltaging works like a charm.

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Last modified on 24 September 2010
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