Power, Temperature, and Overclocking
Power and TemperaturePower readings were taken at the wall with the P3 Kill-a-Watt. The machines were let sit for 15 minutes without going into power saving mode for idle results. Load was taken during Game 2 Test of 3D Mark Vantage.
The idle power was significantly lower on the 890FXA-GD65, but we can attribute quite a bit of that to the cut down feature set of the board compared to the “kitchen sink” editions from MSI and Asus.
I used a laser thermometer on the three major heatsinks for this board. Temps were taken at normal clocks with a highly threaded application running in the background.
The mosfet cooler was warm to the touch, but did a very nice job in keeping that circuitry cool. The southbridge cooler also worked very well, but then again southbridges rarely have the tendency to overheat. The northbridge cooler did get pretty warm. Not so warm as to desolder itself, or achieve 90C+ temperatures that GPUs often do, but it is still pretty warm. A heatpipe connecting the three units would have helped even the temperatures out.
Overclocking
I did a manual overclock and also utilized the OC Genie II functionality. The OC Genie does not adjust any CPU multipliers, but it does decrease the memory ratio. I tried that first before blindly going ahead with a manual overclock.
The OC Genie II was able to take the 1090T to 3.632 GHz @ 1.304 volts. It set the HTT bus to 227 MHz, which resulted in a HTT link of 2270 GT/sec. The northbridge on the CPU was clocked from 2 GHz to 2.27 GHz. This resulted in slightly better memory and L3 cache performance. Unfortunately this was offset by OC Genie II lowering the memory speed from 1333 to 904. Happily, this setting can be changed by the user and we see a nice 2GB/sec performance gain over stock results by setting the memory at 1500 MHz+.
The southern portion of the board, not to be mistaken with the islands. That is GPU land. Instead we see the 6 SATA 6G ports as well as… gasp… more USB 2.0 headers.
Using only the multipliers I was able to achieve 3.95 GHz @ 1.45 volts on this particular CPU. This is pretty average for this particular chip, and we achieve some nice performance gains. The northbridge portion of the chip can hit 2.6 GHz with 1.2 volts, but it gets pretty toasty. 2.4 GHz with 1.1 volts for the northbridge portion makes a significant positive impact in temperature and power draw as compared to the higher setting.
The maximum HTT setting I was able to hit was 325 MHz. For this test I reduced the HTT ratio to 3x, the CPU and northbridge ratios to 7x, and the memory ratio to 1:2. I was able to jump from 200, 233, 266, and 300 MHz without a problem. Above 325 MHz, things were flaky and I could not even boot with 333 MHz.
Overall I was quite pleased with the stability of this board in overclocked situations. The northbridge did get pretty toasty, but it did not seem to hold back the board. More expensive boards like the 890FXA-GD70 and Asus Crosshair IV Formula can do 330 MHz+ with HTT, but for most overclocking purposes 325 MHz is more than adequate.
i think you need to upgrade
i think you need to upgrade your case there josh 😛
Yes, it is old. But it still
Yes, it is old. But it still is an average sized ATX case… and dusty. Hey, we are on a budget here!
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OMG! My Chieftec Dragon case!
OMG! My Chieftec Dragon case! I’m still using mine for the last 7 years! never thought i’d ever see it in this day and age in a PC review! I on the other hand keep mine very clean Josh 😛
Yeah, those cases are tanks.
Yeah, those cases are tanks. Not a perfect design, but I enjoyed using mine for years and years. Fairly roomy in the day and age of not overly large motherboards or graphics cards.
If the Graphics card blocks
If the Graphics card blocks the sata, and the sata are pointed to the right, what does it matter? When you hook things up you do those first and then the card, and when you want to adjust things you take out the card. It isn’t the best solution, but it shouldn’t make the ports unuseable.
Moreso the issue of heatsink in the way is a bad thing, but you have a 69xx card in there right?
The card was the HD 5870 I
The card was the HD 5870 I tested it with.
As for them being blocked… while I was doing testing I did plug in another hard drive, and it was amazingly annoying to do without removing the video card. Now, it is likely not often that people will swap out drives, but it is not unheard of to add an an extra optical drive, or swap in a Blu-ray drive, or buy another larger data drive (hey, 2 TB drives are dirt cheap these days). So, it was an annoyance to me.
I agree though, that northbridge chipset heatsink was very poorly thought out.
does the msi 890fxa-gd65
does the msi 890fxa-gd65 support virtualization like hyperv in server 2008
The 890FX supports IOMMU in
The 890FX supports IOMMU in hardware. Other than that, all VM support is handled by the CPU. The Phenom II and Athlon II series of processors have robust VM support in hardware.