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MSI P7NGM Digital Review
[Abstract]
NVIDIA's Big mGPU Push NVIDIA has been whipping up a storm on the integrated GPU front recently. Last year saw the debut of its GeForce 9300/9400 mGPU chipsets, which tethered the GPU prowess o...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Overclocking
Overclocking is not exactly something that the target audience for mATX boards is looking for. MSI obviously came to the same conclusion, based on the limited settings that we saw on the MSI P7NGM-Digital. Of course, it's not as bad as some motherboards using integrated GPUs that we have seen before. Compared to the ASUS P5N7A-VM however, the MSI has slightly fewer options. In particular, we were unable to change the GPU clock speed unlike the ASUS. Here are some of the options we did find in the BIOS (which we had updated to version 1.1 found on MSI's website):-
- FSB Clock: 400 - 2500MHz
- CPU Ratio: 6.0 - 9.5
- CPU Voltage: 1.215 - 1.9875V (in 0.0125V steps)
- Memory Voltage: 1.80 - 2.55V (in 0.10V steps)
- NB Voltage: 1.060 - 1.354V (in 0.021V steps)
- VTT FSB Voltage: 1.200 - 1.550V (in 0.025V steps)
While its options were limited, the 'quality' of the overclocking was not unduly affected. We could easily push the FSB up a decent amount and the MSI more than matched the ASUS when it came to the FSB limit. In the end, we managed a stable 450MHz, 30MHz over the ASUS and a significant jump over the default.
We had a very decent overclocking result of 450MHz for the FSB on the MSI P7NGM-Digital. |
Test Setup
Since we already had a chipset comparison between the Intel G45 and NVIDIA GeForce 9300 mGPU, we won't be repeating such a thorough set of benchmarks. If you're interested in how the chipset stacks up, you can refer to the article here. We don't expect the MSI P7NGM-Digital to differ significantly. Instead, we'll be using our usual suite of benchmarks for our motherboard reviews, together with a graphics benchmark, power consumption and temperature testing since these are of importance for a integrated GPU motherboard.
To sum up the rest of the hardware configuration:-
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz)
- 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 5-5-5-16 (MSI P7NGM-Digital @ 5-5-5-15)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA HDD 80GB
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c
We took the results for the Intel G45 and ASUS P5N7A-VM for comparison in this review, giving us a total of three motherboards altogether. The integrated GPUs were all manually allocated 256MB of framebuffer. ForceWare 178.24 drivers and NVIDIA chipset driver version 20.08 were used for the NVIDIA GeForce 9300 mGPU chipsets. For the Intel G45 board, the drivers used were 14.36.3.4990 for the graphics and INF 9.1.0.1007 for the chipset.
As we had noted previously, the ASUS P5N7A-VM could not run our DDR2-800 memory at our usual 4-4-4-12 settings. The same issue cropped up on the MSI P7NGM-Digital, so we fell back to 5-5-5-15 that we set manually. This similar setting was also set for the other two boards in their BIOS, though CPU-Z showed the ASUS and the Intel to be running at 5-5-5-16 when we checked.
Benchmarks
The benchmarks used to test the motherboards are as follows:-
BAPco SYSmark 2007 (ver 1.04)
Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
SPECviewperf 9.0
AquaMark3
3DMark06 (ver 110)
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