I chose this motherboard to replace my aging MSI neo2 platinum board. I chose to go with MSI as I had a very good experience with the neo2 running a 50% overclock on my previous CPU. Although this new 975x board did not have all the features of its competitors such as 2x 16x PCI-Express and a large number of sata ports (this board only has 5) I thought it would fulfill my needs as my primary concern was the overclocking potential and stability of the board.
The board is presented well with a manual (actually readable and useful),a generous number of SATA cables (I counted 4 in my box) and various other bits and pieces such as ata cables, back plates etc.
Installation of the motherboard was quick and thanks to the excellent layout I was able to remove the stock northbridge cooler and put my own waterblock on and also have my cpu water block next to it. I like to have a waterblock on my northbridge as they produce a large amount of heat when overclocked and although they are built to take the heat, cause other components in the case to heat up. By using a water block on it, the heat generated is essentially removed from the case.
On booting the board for the first time, the board was unable to POST (power on self test). This I found was due to the supplied BIOS not supporting quad core CPUs (I had tried booting with a QX6700 CPU). A quick trip the MSI's website dug up a bios able to support my chip so I borrowed an e6600 CPU and booted again - this time successfully - in order to update the bios. After updating the bios my QX6700 was successfully read and the pc booted up. This is where the real problems started.
Firstly, I run 3 raptors in raid 0 and have 2 other sata drives for storage. This means that I need both the Intel northbridge and the J-Micron chip on the motherboard active to allow for all the drives (as 1 of the SATA ports is run from the J-Micron controller). The bios would not allow this with the bios I had downloaded and would either work with raid on the Intel northbridge and not have the J-Micron controller working or have both working but with no raid. Not happy with this, it was off to the MSI forum to find a beta bios which would meet my needs. It was clear from a quick search that many people were experiencing the same problem as me and that there was a fix.
After downloading and installing this new bios, I was able to set up my hard drives as I wanted and proceded to fire up the windows XP installer. Part way through the windows install the PC hung and my heart sank as I thought one of my new components must be damaged. First of all though I decided to try one last bios update - another beta. This not only fixed the hard drive problem but also allowed me to install windows. This begs the question - why does the latest official bios not do what a three month old beta bios does?
Slightly disheartened by MSI's support and bioses I then tried overclocking. The motherboard has fairly limited overclocking in terms of fsb step sizes and voltages but I found out that what it does provide it utilises very well indeed. The first thing I tested was simply upping the CPU multiplier (unlocked on the test chip as it is an "extreme" chip). This was increased one by one and then the cpu was stress tested on each core for a day. Overall I was able to achieve 3458Mhz with a multiplier of 13 with stock FSB - not bad 14Ghz of overall processing power :). Memory was also run at stock speeds, held back using a divider so it did not hinder the CPU overclock. Running at this speed returned a super pi time of around 13 seconds to 1 million places.
At this speed, the board has been totally stable in day to day use with the odd counter strike session. I am very happy with this as I was hoping the power regulation would be as good as it was in the neo2 allowing for a high overclock and I was not disappointed.
The bundled software was poor as usual with a bunch of useless applications but this is no surprise as motherboard apps are generally useless as the bios does most of the configuration.
Overall I am very pleased with the board (once I had finally got it running the way I wanted) with good stability and overclocking potential. For the majority of enthusiasts this board will be excellent as it supports a generous amount of all connections (PCI,IDE,SATA and USB) and has inbuilt sound. The only people who I think would be unhappy with this board is either people with an SLI graphics card setup (as this only supports 2x 8x PCI-Express or 1x 16x PCI-Express), people who really want cutting edge boards (~200 pounds) or people who do not want to tinker with bios settings and just want it to work out of the box.
More details
Manufacturer Support
Totally unhelpful
Instruction manual
Good
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