MSI have sent their 870A Fuzion Power Edition motherboard for review. Sporting a Lucid Hydralogix chip this board packs a lot of punch for only a little money!
Product on Review: 870A Fuzion Power Edition
Manufacturer and Sponsor: MSI (Micro Star International)
RRP:Around £110-£115
Manufacturer and Sponsor: MSI (Micro Star International)
RRP:Around £110-£115
Whilst being a well known component manufacturer for a while only fairly recently have MSI made a very good name for themselves creating high quality and high end performance components. Their Frozer range of GPU’s in particular have acquired many accolades recently as have many of their high end motherboard designs such as this.
This feature rich design is almost certainly aiming to provide much of the performance of high end board like ASUS Crosshair series but at less than half the price of the most expensive!
The AMD 870 chipset should deliver great performance and in conjunction with the boards SB850 southbridge offer SATA 6.0Gbps and USB 3.0 connectivity. A stable and capable power regulation and delivery system is also onboard meaning the 870A Fuzion Power Edition should also clock stably and effectively too. A contender for the Crosshair IV Extreme’s throne? Let’s see…
Specifications
Now let’s take a look at the board…
Packaging, accessories and board
A very aggressive and industrial looking design greets the purchaser. Not unattractive it certainly looks like it means business and contains info relating to the main features of the board.
Box front.
Moving onto the base of the packaging and you see that you certainly get all the info you could need. Clear indications of the features of the board including its high class components and the Fuzion technology on offer.
Box rear.
Bundle wise the Fuzion comes fully loaded – indeed I don’t believe I’ve seen as many bits of paper supplied with a motherboard or any other PC component for that matter. There’s even two driver disks. One for the system utilities and drivers and the other for the Lucid software.
Paperwork and disks.
Additional accessories include a variety of cabling including molex to SATA adapters and standard SATA cables. An I/O plate, usb riser to backplate adapter and USB3 front and rear panel assembly which offers a flexible method for installing a USB3 socket. Also present is a small bundle of header adapters for easier installation of the front panel and USB connectors to name a few.
Cables and connectors.
The board itself is a very good looking piece of kit with a dark PCB and black and blue sockets and heatsink covers. It’s a passive design – the mosfet and southbridge/hydra sinks are particularly imposing.
Board top.
The base of the board is clean and simple looking. Besides the CPU heatsink’s base plate you can clearly see that the board’s passive heatsinks are screw mounted rather than spring clipped. I particularly like this new trend as the extra mount pressure afforded by screw down mechanisms provide better contact and consequently offer greater cooling potential.
Board base.
Closer look
Starting at the top of the board you can see the AM3 socket. MSI have created an open and expansive area around the CPU socket which will allow clutter free install. Also in shot is the 4-pin PWM CPU power socket.
The AM3 socket.
Furthest right you can see the four DIMM slots. Just above and to the right of these we can see five of the powerstage Phase indicator lights to identify what state of power usage the CPU and MCP are at. At the board edge there is also the 24-pin 12v socket and a 3-pin chassis fan header.
The DDR3 slots.
Further down the right side of the board is a large pancake heatsink covering the AMD SB850 southbridge chip and the Lucid Hydralogix Fuzion. It is low profile but its large surface area should allow sufficient cooling.
The SB850 and Hydralogix heatsink.
Around the base of that heatsink are the standard bottom right side components including the six SATA 6.0Gbps sockets, various header connectors and the now ubiquitous power and reset buttons. Also present are a ‘Green Power’ button and an ‘OC Genie’ button. One interesting point of note is that the power, reset and green switches are capacitive – no mechanical switch… just finger contact needed!
SATA sockets and capacitive control buttons.
The lowest section of the board is home to a firewire header and three USB headers. As you can see the bios battery is also sat here.
Headers.
Above these are the six expansion slots including two PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, three PCIe x1 slots and a single standard PCI slot. There’s good separation between the x16 slots to allow a free breathing dual slot card or even a triple slot card at a squeeze!
The PCIe and PCI expansion slots.
Closer look continued
Above the PCI socket section is the northbridge heatsink covering the AMD 870. This is a tall but fairly compact passive heatsink so it’ll be interesting to see how it copes.
Northbridge heatsink.
To the left of the northbridge heatsink is a supplemental PCIe 6-pin style socket. This will help provide additional power to the PCIe sockets that are in use.
6-pin PCIe power connector.
The mosfet heatsink is an imposing unit that spans the entire length of the I/O plate to cool the 8+2 phase power system. Also present is a USB 3.0 socket for connecting to the provided breakout socket.
Mosfet sink.
Behind that heatsink is the boards 8-pin 12v ATX connector.
8-pin ATX 12v.
Finally we get to the I/O plate. Due to the lack of an onboard GPU the it isn’t as tightly packed as board I’ve reviewed recently. You get two PS2 sockets to cover ‘ye olde’ keyboards and mice, a very useful clear CMOS button (invaluable in the event of a hard reset being required), both an optical and coaxial digital connector and no fewer than six USB 2.0 sockets. You also get a firewire socket, gigabit LAN socket, USB 3.0 socket and the standard multi channel audio sockets.
I/O plate.
Driver disc and software
The bundled program disk consists of related drivers for the board, various utilities, documentation and bundled programs including Norton.
Main page.
MSI utilities include a variety of monitoring, updating and unlocking programs.
Specific utilities.
Whilst a small selection of multimedia programs are bundled too which is a nice little touch.
Multimedia stuff.
In order of install I first looked at MSI Live Update 4. This is a quick and easy way to update BIOS, Drivers as well as newer versions of utilities already installed on the system.
Live Update 4.
Software continued
Control Center was up next – this is a surprisingly competent and expansive clocking and monitoring program. All the control is here for virtually any aspect of the board. Voltage, clock speeds, multipliers, fan speeds, etc… All are covered in an environment that allows saving and reloading of settings at the touch of a button!
Control Center.
For those that don’t want to tweak too much there’s also a simple three step guide explaining how to activate the ‘OC Genie’ option.
OC Genie.
BIOS Code Unlocked Technology is also a program to help unlock and modify the usable cores on your CPU. Chips like the dual core Phenom II 555 could most likely unlock to a full quad core using this system.
Core unlocking.
Also present on the utility disk was AMD’s own Overdrive program. As with the ‘Control Center’ you can monitor system state and adjust settings to achieve overclocks. Not as pretty as MSI’s offering but very useful none the less!
AMD Overdrive.
Finally here is a shot of Lucid’s Hydra software. It’s a simple setup with the first page simply allowing you to enable Hydra, show the tray icon and turn the logo on and off in game. The other pages are just as sparse – ‘Games’ gives you a list of the Hydra enable games available on your system and ‘About’ states the version of the Hydra engine that’s currently running.
Lucid.
Setup, clocking and temps
Test Setup
CPU: Phenom II X6 1100T @ 3.3GHz
RAM: 4gb OCZ 1333MHz
HDD: 160gb WD 7200rpm SATA HDD
Optical drive: HP DVDRW
CPU cooler: Coolermaster Hyper TX3
PSU: Nexus RX-8500 850w
GPU: 2x Gainward GTX260
Case: Dimastech Bench Table 2.5
RAM: 4gb OCZ 1333MHz
HDD: 160gb WD 7200rpm SATA HDD
Optical drive: HP DVDRW
CPU cooler: Coolermaster Hyper TX3
PSU: Nexus RX-8500 850w
GPU: 2x Gainward GTX260
Case: Dimastech Bench Table 2.5
Overclocking
The 1100T is already a fast CPU running at a stock clock of 3.3GHz.
Stock.
I wanted to see how MSI’s own ‘OC Genie’ button would treat the 1100T so activated it and restarted.
You receive a message upon first boot that keeping settings as they are is advised – however I knew that the DDR3 would be running out or spec so enterd the BIOS to adjust and make sure it was below 1333MHz.
Once saved and restarted I discovered that the Genie had successfully put 500MHz on the clockspeed. The resulting 3.8GHz speed was certainly impressive. As one button clocks go this was pretty impressive and certainly in the Crosshair league.
3.8GHz.
Sound
The PWM fan control on the Fuzion was exemplary. Along with the fanless sinks it made the board a pleasure to use as it was quiet throughout testing… even @ 3.8GHz.
Board temps
Motherboard temps were kept well under control during testing – as long as there was a touch of airflow around the sinks the north and southbridge sinks never got more than warm. The mosfet sink was lukewarm throughout – even under extended stress testing sessions.
Results – AIDA 64 Extreme
I tested desktop and encoding performance initially using AIDA64’s CPU testing routines, Futuremark’s PCMark05, SuperPi, Cinebench and the x264 HD benchmark.
Up first is AIDA64. I’ve only recently tested it with the Llano review I did. As a result some of the comparison scores come from Dave’s testing – HERE
In practice the board using the flagship 1100T hex core chip does a very respectable job. Photoworrx and AES seem to prefer the Intel Sandybridge systems however the performance offered by the extra physical cores and additional L3 cache over the quad core Llano E3850 is very impressive. The raw horsepower delivered by the additional cores really shows with the CPU Queen and FPU Mandel tests where this motherboard/chip combo beat even the Intel chips.
Results – PCMark05 and Superpi
PCMark05 is a mixed test of general desktop duties to give a general overview of office style performance.
It appears at around the level I’d expect providing similar performance to other boards using a similar CPU/GPU combo.
SuperPi was next. This program offers a good impression of how raw clockspeed increases effect performance.
Again the performance here matches the expected result compared to the other systems listed.
Results – Cinebench and x264HD
The Cinebench testing suite followed. Rendering a 3D image is quite a difficult task so this is a good test of raw performance. It’s multithreaded too so will fully utilise all the cores available to render the 300,000 polygons across around 2,000 objects in the scene.
Another decent result here. At stock it is slightly behind the overclocked ECS A885GM but that is probably down to overclocked FSB and memory. Up at 3.8GHz it actually matches the Crosshair IV Extreme running @ 3.86GHz.
The final desktop test was the x264 HD benchmark. This ‘real time’ video encoding test makes four passes over two different files to convert a DVD quality MPEG-2 video into an x264 video file. I took the average of each of the four results from the two groups to generate the final result.
Solid performance here once again. Bearing in mind that no two runs will be identical the results virtually mirror those of the other boards with their respective hex core CPU installed. Excellent stuff.
Results – 3DMark06 and Vantage
Gaming tests are next – along with Futuremark based Bench tests I chose to test with Blacksite, Dead Space, Far Cry 2 and Unreal Tournament III.
Up first is Futuremark’s 3DMark06 benchmark program.
The trend is seen again. The heightened stock speed of the 1100T over the 1055T gives it the edge when running stock with both single and dual GPU’s.
Next is Futuremark’s newer 3DMark Vantage benchmark program.
The margin of advantage when clocking is less here – as is the advantage of the faster stock speed of the 1100T. Dual cards really boosts the overall score though although the stock Fuzion in ‘Hydra mode’ loses out to the stock Crosshair IV Extreme in ‘Hydra mode’ despite running at a 500MHz higher clockspeed.
Results – Blacksite
Moving onto actual games – our results here represent the average frame rate produced by the system.
Black Site up first – a well programmed game that looks great and is a good test of hardware. All settings were at their highest and only resolution was adjusted.
Results match the expected values. The Fuzion holds its own against the Crosshair here.
Results – Dead Space
Dead Space up next – a survival horror game with moody dark graphics. Certainly a favourite with many! This was tested @ the highest settings available in the game settings.
The performance matched quite similarly throughout the testing of this game. Nice performance and a decent boost from activating Hydra.
Results – Far Cry 2
Far Cry 2 is a technical monster. Highly detailed and expansive world does a very good job at pushing high end hardware even today.
The results reflect the clock speeds offered by the two systems with the Fuzions higher clocked stock results besting the Crosshair and vice versa for the highly clocked results. Once again Hydra offered a nice increase in performance – indeed @ 1920×1200 it made the difference between pretty smooth and super smooth.
Results – Unreal Tournament III
The final game on test is Unreal Tournament III. This is a game that scales well with improvements in hardware and system speed. It was run at highest settings and only the resolution was adjusted.
The Fuzion is ever so slightly down on the Crosshair across the board. UT3 exhibited the same dual card issues where it only seemed to make use of the single card. I’ll keep an eye on updates and patches to see if there’s a way to get it to work.
Conclusion
I’m honestly a little blown away by this board. It certainly does its job in an unfussy and simple way and provides performance that virtually mirrors the top end boards offered by ASUS.
Unlike the Crosshair IV Extreme the Fuzion is relatively affordable too – certainly a viable core component for a very high end gaming system. I can imagine many users prepared to stick by their AMD quad and hex cores choosing a board like this to eek out that extra perfromance.
Of course there’s newer chips on the horizon and Intel’s offerings remain highly competitive but if you have an Athlon II or Phenom II that you want to use in your next build then I can think of worse ways to breathe new life into your system!
The MSI 870A Fuzion Power Edition.
Pros
+ Impressive, simple and controlled overclocking performance
+ Cool running chipset
+ Very comprehensive software bundle
+ Good looking
+ Nice board layout
+ Affordable
Cons
– Not really any
+ Impressive, simple and controlled overclocking performance
+ Cool running chipset
+ Very comprehensive software bundle
+ Good looking
+ Nice board layout
+ Affordable
Cons
– Not really any
Vortez would like to thank MSI for supplying the 870A Fuzion Power Edition for review.
