Introduction

The words ‘enthusiast’ and ‘budget’ don’t often go together when talking about computers. These days, enthusiast means getting the highest end components so you can have plenty of bells and whistles to play with. So imagine my surprise when I heard MSI is releasing an 890FX motherboard that will retail at an 890GX price point. Without any information to go by, my imagination got the best of me and started thinking, what could this board possibly offer? To cut costs they probably chose a micro-ATX form factor and limited the expansion to four PCI-E slots. They probably also chose to cut back on some quality components, like solid capacitors, and with minimal cooling, do not intend it to be highly overclockable. When the board finally arrived, needless to say, I was very happy to be wrong about my assumptions.

Micro-Star International has been in business since 1986 and is a well established name in video card and motherboard manufacturing. Instead of cutting back on features so they can build a sub-$150 motherboard, MSI chose to cut out most of the fat and unnecessary features from their high-end 890FXA-GD70 and even had room in the budget to improve upon some of the design aspects of the 890FX-GD70.

The MSI 890FXA-GD65 motherboard is a low cost option for value-minded enthusiasts. The 890FXA-GD65 is part of MSI’s gaming series of motherboards, featuring Military Class II high quality components and high overclockability. The MSI 890FXA-GD65 supports all the latest AM3 processors and has two PCIE x16 slots for AMD CrossFireX. Despite being a budget 890FX board, the MSI 890FXA-GD65 is rife with connectivity options, with eight USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports at the rear and support for up to six SATA 6Gb/s devices. For the overclocking enthusiasts, the MSI 890FXA-GD65 motherboard has a clear CMOS reset button at the rear, improved power regulation, extra power for the PCIe lanes and alternately spaced out DIMM slots for better RAM temperatures. The MSI 890FXA-GD65 is a perfect motherboard for the bang-for-buck enthusiast build.