MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 Review: Know Your Platform

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:

OCZ for donating the 1250W Gold Power Supply and USB testing SSD
Micron for donating our SATA testing SSD
G.Skill for donating our memory kits
ASUS for donating AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs
Rosewill for donating the 500W Platinum Power Supply

Test Setup

Power Consumption

Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.

Power Consumption on the MSI in comparison to the other A85X boards tested seems to be better during loaded scenarios, but higher at idle.

Windows 7 POST Time

Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows 7 starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.

It has been a short while since we tested an MSI board in its POST timings, and unfortunately the MSI FM2 motherboard takes the longest out of all our FM2 testing. The motherboards we have tested that take longer are often well equipped for from lower tier manufacturers. The fact that disabling controllers increases the boot time is a little strange as well.