MSI DKA790GX Platinum Review

ajmatson - October 26, 2008
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Testing:

To put the MSI DKA790GX Platinum to the wall I will be running a series of scientific and video benchmarks which will push this motherboard to its limits. I will then compare the DKA790GX Platinum against other boards in its class including the Foxconn A7DA-S which is another 790GX based motherboard and the ASUS M3N78 Pro which is based on the latest GeForce 8300 chipset. To keep any variables from interfering with the scores and comparisons all of the boards will be run with the same hardware setup and everything will be set at their stock speeds, timings, and voltages unless noted as in the overclocking section.

Test Setup:

Processor: AMD Phenom 9850 "Black Box" (200x12.5)
Motherboard: MSI DKA790GX Platinum
Memory: Mushkin Redline XP2 8000 2 x 2 GB 5-5-5-12
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 w/ Catalyst 8.8
Power Supply: Mushkin 800w Modular Power Supply
Hard Drive: Seagate 7200.11 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: Lite-On 8x DVD+/-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Motherboards:

Comparison Motherboard 1: Sapphire PC-AM2RX780
Comparison Motherboard 2: Foxconn A7DA-S
Comparison Motherboard 3: ASUS M3N78 Pro

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Processor: AMD Phenom 9850 "Black Box" @ 205x16 = 3.280GHz
Memory: Mushkin Redline XP2 8000 2 x 2 GB 5-5-5-15 @ 1092MHz

The overclocking on the MSI DKA790GX Platinum will come two fold. First is the overclocking using only the OC Dip Switches on the motherboard. I will place the switches at their maximum setting of a 20% overclock to see how the board configures the overclock. Before doing this you have to load the BIOS defaults so nothing is already overclocked. When the computer was up and running I took a look at CPU-Z and to my amazement the board was running stable at 3.0GHz. The switches upped the Bus Speed to 240MHz and the memory up to 960MHz. Not bad for throwing just a few switches.

While this is a decent overclock I wanted to see what the board really had to offer. So I started with my tinkering in the BIOS to see where I can get. I upped the multiplier to 16x little by little until I could no longer get a stable boot. Then I went over to the Bus Speed and pushed it up 1MHz at a time until I could not boot into Windows. Finally I had what was my wall for the overclock. With a VCore max of 1.45v I dared not to go any further. So for the overclocking scores I will be running at 3.280GHz (205x16x) at 1.45v. The memory was bumped up to 1092MHz as a result of the Bus increase.