MSI 890GXM-G65

MSI 890GXM-G65 Motherboard

A lot of interesting things have happened in the world of motherboards recently. The advent of SATA 6Gbps means our storage needs will have all the bandwidth they'll need for at least a little while. USB 3.0 means our flash drives can join in on the bandwidth fun as well. It's no surprise that a company like decided to incorporate both of these new technologies into their new AMD based motherboard, the . This new board will also support AMD's brand new , all while packaged in a small Micro-ATX shell. The front of the box shows that the board is using the new 890GX chipset. While it doesn’t explicitly say it on the box, this board will support the new 6-core Thuban chips with the latest installed BIOS. The onboard Radeon 4290 means this board has a plethora of video connection possibilities right out of the box. It won’t be maxing out Crysis any time soon, but should work for some light gaming. With the small form factor and the various video connectors, this motherboard falls into an interesting category. On the one hand, it would make for an excellent HTPC build, by utilizing the HDMI port. On the other hand, it can perform as a high performance portable LAN box, by using the 2 PCI x16 slots for CrossfireX or Hybrid Crossfire and a high performance CPU (think 6-core Thuban). It’s not often that motherboards exhibit this kind of versatility.