MSI A78M-E45 FM2+ Unboxing
MSI A78M-E45 Motherboard
Introduction
MSI A78M-E45 is a mid to entry-level motherboard for simple APU gaming machines and home entertainment PCs. It's aggressively priced and I managed to get hold on this motherboard from the store for approx. 54 USD(Sweden). Even though it is an entry-level motherboard it has overclocking features, quiet a beefy VRM heatsink, Four Dimm slots and two physical 16x PCIe slots, the bottom one is only 4x electrical though.
Front
Included Accessories
A quick look inside the box.
The I/O Shield is plain metallic with punched markings for which connector is which. There are 2 high quality sata cables with straight to 90° angled connectors with latches. Simple white/black colours. What I actually freaked out a bit over was the really nice sized motherboard manual. It's brilliant. Far smaller than the regular one. Better for the environment and easier to handle with one hand, perfect!
Included
Chipset
AMDs newest FM2+ Platform is a revised version of the FM2 platform, the specific chipset this motherboard is built upon is the model A78, also known as Bolton-D3. The chipset features nothing especially spectacular but full native USB 3.0, AHCI Sata controller running 6x 6Gb/s sata connections and supports raid 0, 1 and 10. The total TDP of the chipset is approx. 8W making the platform fairly low power driven compared to older chipsets and platforms. When combined with a FM2+ APU the motherboard supports PCIe 3.0 but runs on the integrated PCIe controller of the CPU, meaning that the FM2 processor will be limited to "only" PCIe 2.0.
The LAN is a 1Gb/s integrated controller so ample of bandwidth available.
Integrated Peripherals
MSI has designed this motherboard fairly well, the Chipset is decent, featuring most of the features one might want and need for a modern PC. However, the Audio chipset integrated on the motherboard might leave some left to desire, although the Audio chip supports 7.1Channels HD Audio, it is only an analog out, there is no Digital auto. Also the performance and fidelity given of the Realtek ALC887, is not the best. It does the job, but that is about it. Persons using USB-driven Headphones, a TV through HDMI or cheap PC Speakers might not care. But for those audiophiles and analog headphone users might wanna look at some other DACs.
Internal Layout and Aesthetics
Considering this is one of the mid-entry level motherboards it is in my honest opinion on of the better looking motherboards. The PCB itself is actually a brown tint which makes the black connectors blacker, and the blue brighter. Neat! The layout is simple, yet clever.
Layout
The 1x PCIe is unfortunately beneath the top 16x PCIe graphics slot rendering the use of a WiFi, capture or sound card much harder. Placing this 1x slot on the top would have made much more sense since the clearance for a big air cooler would be far greater when no card in the 1x would be in use. The next PCIe is on the bottom making it suitable for a second graphics card in cases with five expansion slots such as the BitFenix Phenom with an extra gap between the two cards.
The VRM Heatsink is impressive considering the price and competitions closest lineups. Might help with overclocking. The Auxiliary CPU power is only a 4pin which limits the power to the socket from the PSU directly to only 150Ws. Completely sufficient, remember, the motherboards supply some power as well. Considering the power usage of a AMD A10 7850k should be far below the total of 150W overclocked so there is no reason to despair.
VRM Heatsink
What I find the Motherboard lacking is the amount of fan headers. There is a 4-pin CPUFan, a 4-pin SysFan and a 3-pin SysFan, that's it. Something which severely limits the amount of supported fan without the use of adapters. Personally I'd like to see at least one more 3-pin. Preferable 2more for a total of 4 SysFans.
There are 8 mounting holes(the MSI website states 6 which is wrong) and the motherboard is a full size mATX in width.
The PCB is the same MSI use for higher end cards indicated of the vacant slot for 2 additional Sata Ports.
Vacant slot for Sata-ports
Memory
The motherboard features four Memory slots capable of supporting up to 64GB of Ram, it does not on the other-hand support ECC-memory which limits the actual memory to a maximum of 32GB since there is no real supply of 16GB non-ECC ram as of yet. It supports memory speeds a maximum of 2133MHz which puts it on par with the integrated Memory Controller in the AMD APU flagships, clever design. It utilities a dual channel design and supports both AMP (AMD Memory Profile) and XMP (Extreme Memory Profile).
UEFI
Welcome to MSI A78 UEFI. It is fairly simple and easy to find your way around and I do actually really prefer this over both Asrocks and Asus' UEFI. It does some what tie with Gigabytes Bioses in my honest opinion.
Main page, accessible and fairly straightforward. The only actually interesting pages are the settings and OC page. The settings page is where you go to deactivate or activate options such as raid, decide which graphical adapter should be the primary one and perhaps deactivate USB 3 controller if you so should desire.
The boot order is accessible the entire time and supports drag and drop to reorder the order, also note the OCGenie button in the top left corner. Something which really annoyed me is that there is no warning or confirmation when you push that button, also note that there seems to be no way to depress that button when pressed, unless you reboot into UEFI, which will activate the automatic overclock.
This is the CPU specification screen, you'll find it through the OCpage and then on the bottom of that page, Athlon x4 760k @ 3.8GHz (Stock Speed).
This is probably the usual screen you enter when actually going into the UEFI. I feel that there could be more comprehensive information for some of the options but it is mostly sufficient. Easy to navigate this screen.
This is the OCGenie function and what it managed to produce on this CPU.
3% Are you kidding me? This result is seriously subpar with other auto-OC implementations.
Might just be my CPU that is the reason. I expect other CPUs to overclock higher with OCGenie since OCGenie on my Z77A-GD65 overclocks a i5 3570k to about 10% above turbo frequencies. My Athlon is also known to usually be pretty aggressively clocked.
No, the OCGenie on this board is not even close to what we are used to see on more expensive boards, for good reasons.
On the plus side it did also overclock both RAM and Northbridge, from what I can tell it works both on unlocked and locked CPU since it works with the FSB(Base Frequency) and not the Multiplier(CPU Ratio). The weird part is that even changing the FSB yourself makes no difference inside the OS.
The FSB is also limited to only 100-105. Underclocking works down to a ratio of 8 but the lowest my CPU goes is 1800MHz.
Also please notice there are no Voltage options for the Vcore or IMC. Only the Ram itself.
This is the Board Explorer, I have not seen this feature around earlier and it seems to be pretty straightforward. Point and click on the picture of the motherboard and you will get this interactive schematic of the I/O or info about Which memory/PCIe slot is populated. I can see this come in handy if your Computer can not detect some hardware.
The decision of making it a pop-up window on the other hand feels really weird, not only did I have to spam "F12" to the brink of extinction to be able to take a screenshot it also is a bit laggy. Feels really counter-intuitive to have two "close and exit" X-crosses right besides each other. Luckily the one exiting the UEFI all-together is disabled while this pop-up windows is up.
To improve this page I would like to see voltage and thermal sensors displaying temp/voltage across the board.
The hardware monitor is basically a really fancy fan-controller and "in-UEFI" temperature sensor. And with fancy I mean really basic. There is no way to have a smooth curvature on the fan speed to temperature, it is strictly linear with a starting and an ending temperature (at least 40°C) and a min/max fan speed slider.
Again, this is to no use for me, I would rather see a summary of all temperatures on VRMs and alike or voltages of different controllers, at least let there be a fan option to make the curvature increase the fan speed exponentially instead, or add a target temperature instead of the Max/min only. Then again, it is nice that there are some options and sensors available to you with in the bios.
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All-in-all, the UEFI does the job and the overclocking and settings pages are comprehensive, compact and does the job. The extra features is little to no use for me personally. Then again for a motherboard priced at sub-$70 the quality and performance of the extra options does not really surprise me and the actually fact that there is overclocking support should be enough for a potential buyer, don't rely on the OCGenie function doing it for you though.
The experience inside the UEFI is mostly fluent and only the Screenshot function mess up occasionally making the UEFI freeze for a second or two. I do actually suspect my keyboard is the issue here when the F12 and screenshot not registering properly while inside a pop-up window.
I look forward to take a stroll through this UEFI while overclocking my Athlon further down the road.
Connectivity
There is a fair bit of connectivity on the motherboard. The HDMI also is 4k resolution capable. I would really like a DisplayPort connector though.
I/O Panel
Overclockability
Even-though there is no voltage options inside the bios, overclocking is very much an option on this motherboard. MSI have kept going on their usual way and left the voltage completely unlocked through the OS(Windows), I used AMD Overdrive. The stock voltage for my chip is 1.4V, it is possible to over-voltage all the way to 1.55V. The high voltage should be sufficient for all but the more extreme overclocks. It is possible to overclock the multiplier both as a turbo Core ratio or as the standard CPU ratio. I opted for the easier one and overclocked with the standard CPU ratio and constant voltage.
Since the Richland CPUs throttle somewhere between 70-74°C but the silicon is guaranteed to withstand temperatures above 94°C. I opted to put myself right below 70°C in an open testbench.
With this chip I managed to get 4.4GHz @ 1.3625V stable, With the stock cooler. Wow, didn't realise that the Richlands was that easy to cool. (Major Ivy bridge owner...). Nice, voltages was stable and no issue from the motherboard, the VRM heatsink is beefy enough to cool the VRMs. I imagine I could get the Chip way higher, probably up around 5GHz as long as I got a big enough CPU cooler.
Summary
This is a really interesting motherboard, MSI have taken a sub $70 mATX motherboard with both decent cooling for the power phases and VRM and enabled both CrossfireX and lots of Ram-expandability making this motherboard really attractive for a simple cheap machine. For those wanting easier overclocks it could work as well but I can not recommend auto enabled overclocks from with in the OS because all the risks it entails, such as corrupted files and a loop where it is stable enough to boot but not to get into windows long enough to disable the OC. If you manually enable the OC each boot you should be fine.
For those wanting overclocking from within the UEFI I recommend you check out the A88X-E45 instead.
"Detta är min första peek på mina experiement på att överklocka AMDs FM2 och FM2+ plattform. Jag kommer börja med AMD Athlon x4 760k på luft nästa vecka. Med tillräckligt gensvar så kommer det ske även med Vattenkylning (inte AIO utan riktiga grejer). Samtliga guider och unboxings kommer skrivas på engelska för att kunna nå en bredare publik". - David
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