Foxconn A7DA-S & MSI DKA790GX Platinum Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

MSI DKA790GX Platinum

Compared to the functional but bland Foxconn A7DA-S, MSI has positioned its 790GX board, the DKA790GX Platinum as part of its gaming series, with the inclusion of new technologies that have been introduced recently, like its DrMOS feature, which is an integrated Driver-MOSFET package that claims to be more power efficient. You can read about this proprietary technology in our previous review.

With its DrMOS technology prominently advertised on its heatsink, MSI's DKA790GX Platinum is not at all shy about its capabilities.

The major difference between the MSI and the Foxconn boards in terms of their I/O connectors include an optical S/PDIF output on the MSI and the greater number of USB ports on the MSI (at the expense of a PS/2 port). There is also an eSATA port here when the Foxconn's only had an internal connector.

As you can see here, the MSI DKA790GX Platinum has slightly more connectors than the Foxconn, and the addition of an optical S/PDIF could be an important feature to some users. It is also always more useful to have the eSATA port at the rear rather than the internal header form we saw on the Foxconn.

MSI's arrangement of its SATA ports is almost perfect, except for the lone port that's facing upwards. We did however give the thumbs up for the side aligned IDE connector.

A similarly ample spaced layout for the expansion slots on the MSI.

Like the Foxconn, the expansion options on this MSI board are the same and also includes a pair of PCIe 2.0 x16 slots and in a similar layout too. The floppy connector was placed at the edge of the board besides the PCI slots so the resultant cable could end up in the way of quite a few components. An interesting feature we noted is the presence of hardware OC jumpers, which can be adjusted (via two small toggles) to enable different degrees of overclocking (10%, 15%, 20%). We tested the maximum 20% overclock which pushed the HyperTransport clock up to 240MHz from 200MHz and the board gave us no troubles.

Unlike the D.O.T overclocking that we have seen in some of MSI's BIOS before, this 790GX comes with these two switches which can be toggled for varying levels of overclocking. We tried the maximum 20% option available and that pushed our HTT Clock to 240MHz without a fuss.

DrMOS technology is found on this MSI board, like its other recent boards, purporting to increase its power efficiency. From our experiences with it so far, it does have an effect, though not a dramatic change.

Onboard features of this MSI board include a similar Realtek ALC888 HD Audio CODEC that's also found on the Foxconn, a Jmicron JMB381 FireWire controller that has only support for one port and a Realtek RTL8111C Gigabit LAN controller. In fact, the feature list would seem very similar to that of the Foxconn A7DA-S and probably reflects the standard implementation of the 790GX chipset. MSI did have dual heat pipe heatsinks for its North and Southbridges for better heat transfer.

Similar to the Foxconn, this MSI came with 128MB of DDR3-1333 memory for the onboard graphics.

A fine set of switches for the enthusiast to fool around with, especially the very useful Clear CMOS button.



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