MSI 770-C35 motherboard

With all the craze of new processors being released, MSI is one of the few to introduce a mid-ranged AMD board based on the AMD 770 and SB710 chipset and is named the MSl 770-C35. This board has the length of an ATX form factor motherboard but is not as wide as a standard ATX board, which will cause a full length high-end graphics card to high-end graphics card to stick out even further thsn it would with a standard ATX form factor. The northbridge and the southbridge heatsinks are dark red in colour. The southbridge heatsinks is small and gets heated up quite a bit. Now MSI has done something really interesting, not only is this motherboard AM3 ready, but this motherboard also supports DDR3 memory. But at the same time, it was equally strange to see a COM pon at the ljO side of this motherboard.

When it comes to expansion, this motherboard has one PCle xl6 slot, two PC!e x 1 slots and three PC! slots. The MSI 770-C35 comes with an interesting overclocking feature, which is controlled by two switches. According to the different positions you place the switches in, you can boost the FSB by up to 20 per cenl. The DIMM slots are pretty close to the CPU socket, but even after we used a Cooler Master Hyper TX2, we could fit the a memory stick into the first slot, so it isn't much of a concern.

We used the AMD Phenom II 955 BE to test the performance of this motherboard along with 4 GB of DDR3 memory and an ASUS ENGTX285 TOP. We got some great scores in benchmarks such as 3D Mark 06 (16361), PC Mark 05 (11875), Cinebench (10465) and even with games such as Doom 3 and Prey.

DDR3 memory prices are already slowly on the decline. This motherboard would make for a decent upgrade and not a high end gaming rig.