MSI 990FXA-GD65 is proposed as high-end motherboard for AMD AM3+ CPU, so compatible with the upcoming AMD Bulldozer. Powered by the AMD 990FX chipset, it has nice features, that we will discuss during this review.

[VERSIONE ITALIANA]

Overclock

As a must we have verified the behavior of MSI 990FXA-GD65 under overclocking and we must say that it has not shown any uncertainty. In the BIOS we have disabled the various mechanisms of energy saving and the Turbo, and we've set the voltage to the processor in manual at 1.45v which is the maximum voltage allowed to remain in safe parameters. Since the Phenom II X6 1090T processor is of the unlocked type, this allowed us to raise the multiplier bringing up to maximum stable allowed for that voltage at 20x, so the resulting frequency was 200x20 = 4000 MHz. Although the low temperature reached the CPU would allow us to rise further, in fact we have achieved as a test a frequency of 4400 MHz, but the voltage to maintain this rate was slightly higher than the 1.60 V, very prohibitive for a daily use basis. Remember that Thuban series processors are built with 45nm lithography, that's why the very high voltages. The next thing to take into account is that our processor, although cold, is not a particularly successful example in overclocking. Focusing on the motherboard, as confirmed by the excellent tool CPU-Z and HWMonitor, the voltage was very stable, showing for brief moments of time values ​​of 1.58 V (against the 1.45 V set by BIOS). However, we do not feel to confirm this value, since it could be a simple reading error of the chip used on this motherboard. We conducted the following tests to confirm the full stability in overclocking of the MSI 990FXA-GD65.

We show then the first screenshot on LinX. This program is based on the Linpack libraries that stress the floating point unit of the processor. Interesting the Gigaflops value returned to the screen, a sign of the robustness of the power circuit that allowed the processor to release its full computing power without hesitation.

Moving on to the next test Prime95 also known to stimulate the group Motherboard CPU RAM. Prime95 can run in 3 different modes, from the initial SmallFFT that stresses only the processor, In-place large FFT focuses primarily on the processor and few on the RAM while the last of the tern, the Blend test intensifies the calculation on the CPU, RAM and chipset. We propose the test completion screen.