Overclocking the MSI 890FXA-G70
There are several different ways to overclock this board.  The traditional BIOS, the OC Button and dial, the OC Genie setting in the BIOS, and by using AMD OverDrive or MSI Control Center.  All of them work, but some are more effective than others.

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One can see the initial confusion of thinking that MSI did not actually install the buttons on this motherboard.  “RTFM!” shouted the MSI PR rep, over his lousy cellphone connection.  And I did.  And it was good.

Going in and individually setting the BIOS to the desired settings is the most effective.  This allows users to control the different memory, CPU, and HTT multipliers as well as voltages to all major components.  Using this method I was able to achieve an easy 4 GHz overclock on the X6 1090T processor.  I was able to tweak it up to 4.1 GHz, but that was getting into an area where I was concerned about voltage on the processor.  I was also able to overclock the HTT bus to an impressive 318 MHz in a separate test.  I could again have gone higher with more voltage, but it was stable over 3 days at that speed and stock voltages.

The OC Button and dial are of limited use, because it only increases the HTT speed.  This does serve a purpose in overclocking though.  Once a stable overclock is found, the user can boot into Windows (or other OS of choice) and fine tune the CPU speed and HTT speed very easily with the dial.  It is just a simple way to increase the speeds without going into an overclocking program.

Control Center and AMD OD are very similar in that they can overclock the board in a Windows operating environment.  Most of the settings are available to these programs, and a successful overclock in the same range as I described above can be achieved.  Voltages can be problematic at times with these software solutions, as they do not always have the ability to change voltages while the board is running.  Only using the BIOS and rebooting are able to adjust some of these settings.

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Unlike other competitor’s boards, there are not a lot of filtering capacitors around the sound chip.  This may or may not affect audio quality, but if quality is truly what a user is looking for, then going to a standalone sound card is best.  Note as well the VIA firewire chip, and the dual ethernet chips.

The final way is the OC Genie overclocking setting in the BIOS.  All the user does is go into the BIOS and the Cell Menu, enable OC Genie, and reboot the system.  The system then automatically overclocks itself, makes sure it is stable, then boots up.  At this point, the user will want to go into the BIOS and then disable OC Genie.  Unless of course the user wants the system to re-overclock itself the next time it boots.  Once OC Genie is disabled, all of the settings it used to achieve the overclock are left in place.

OC Genie overclocked the HTT to 230 MHz, the CPU to 3.68 GHz, the northbridge/memory controller to 2.3 GHz, and raised the CPU voltage to 1.336v and the northbridge to 1.1v.  Considering that my CPU sample was able to go to 3.8 GHz on stock voltage, this is not the world’s most impressive overclock.  But it was very easy to do, and the results were stable in my testing.  For novices to overclocking, this is a good way to get their feet wet.


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