MSI B85M ECO Review: Aiming Green at $73
by Ian Cutress on November 26, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- B85
- ECO
MSI B85M ECO In The Box
Nothing immediately springs to mind as an interesting extra when discussing low powered motherboards. Any special feature we might usually consider with high-end consumer facing products will either use power or increase the cost of the package. In a similar vein, as there is no multi-GPU support for B85, no SLI/Crossfire bridges are needed. As another incentive to MSI to keep the package light is that if the target market of this motherboard is more in the office PC-under-the-desk scenario, extras will not necessarily be wanted beyond a pair of SATA cables.
In the box we get:
Driver DVD
Manuals
Rear IO Shield
Two SATA Cables
As expected, this keeps the costs down.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU and a Corsair H80i CLC.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.
Test Setup
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-4770K ES 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.5 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboard | MSI B85M ECO |
| Cooling | Cooler Master Nepton 140XL |
| Power Supply | Rosewill SilentNight 500W Platinum Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsZ 2x4 GB DDR3-1600 |
| Video Cards | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Drivers 337 |
| Hard Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 256GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
| USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
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DanNeely - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
"We used MSI’s base numbers (which in the world of marketing usually show the product in the best light possible), and calculated that in comparison to a standard range motherboard the MSI ECO can make financial sense to users with a 4-5 year upgrade cycle. Any shorter and it won’t make sense, though arguably our own numbers showed that the more the system is used in terms of loading, the better the financial outcome. If businesses are sticking to a 3 year upgrade cycle, this might not be enough of a saving to make sense."It's worth keeping in mind for breakeven considerations that a price that's marginal at average electric prices will be a big winner in areas that have prices well above average. Hawaii pays almost 3x the national average, New York (and much of new england) are roughly one and a half times the average.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/27/14176634...
xenol - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
While the target market and idea is noble, I'm thinking... unless MSI can get an OEM to use these boards, I just don't see any business bulk ordering them from Newegg and assembling those thousands of custom rigs.Flunk - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
OEMs don't generally use retail boards, they contract out for their own variant. I can't see them doing that with this design right now because of the tight margins involved in PC sales and the difficulty in marketing a computer that's 10% more energy-efficient.For $73 this would be right at home in a SMB or home server, HTPC (although with all the little android boxes out there this is a rapidly dying segment) or just your average little desktop. Even without the ECO claims the board isn't overpriced.
just4U - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
I'd have been more interested in a eco friendly variant that has long life claims similar to Asus Tuff series.mike_m_ekim - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Agreed; on the other hand, corporations that order thousands of computers do care about power consumption, so there is a chance of OEM adoption.yudha haryo saputro - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
i alerdy confuse about this spesification is Four DDR4 DIMM slots supporting up to 32 GBUp to Dual Channel, 1600 MHz, but the test setup is G.Skill RipjawsZ 2x4 GB DDR3-1600 9-11-9 Kit,
DDR3 , what the real spesification?
Mikemk - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
LGA 1150 would be DDR3Ian Cutress - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
It's DDR3, a copy/paste error from my table generation. Fixed!yudha haryo saputro - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
okey, Thanks for improvementsimonpschmitt - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
I live in Germany witch seems to be a target market going by the "TÜV-Saarland" certification and a medium size buisness I do the IT for has electrical costs of ~0.26€ / kWh = 0.32$ / kWh. Using your workyear assumptions this gives us savings of 7.73$ per year. With a more realistical 5 year product cycle you would save nearly 38$.