Comments Locked

20 Comments

Back to Article

  • ranutso - Wednesday, March 21, 2007 - link

    Great article. Thank you Gary.
  • cosmotic - Wednesday, March 14, 2007 - link

    How can you say that MSI software is decent? It's totally hideous. I think Anandtech owes it to the community to encourage motherboard manufactures to start writing native-feeling Windows applications instead of these crap piles all the manufactueres are shipping now. This includes AMD/ATI, nVidia, Realtek, and many others for their drivers as well.
  • Gorgonzola - Thursday, June 21, 2007 - link

    I could not agree more!
  • anandtech02148 - Wednesday, March 14, 2007 - link

    Here I go again
    complaining about the psu and power consumption, but 300watts load,200watts idle,
    not to mention fancy subwoofer, a few electronics here there,
    good gaming is in the summer time, and i'll be cranking up the AC too which is another 250wtts.
    i wish newegg.com would sell me a n.korean light water nuclear reactor so i can run all my greatest hardwares.




  • Spanki - Wednesday, March 14, 2007 - link

    Hey Gary,

    Since it looks like this mb outperforms pretty much every other board in the review in most tests (at stock speeds, where head-to-head comparisons usually take place) - including the much touted 'Extreme' board(s), do you plan to include it for comparisons in future reviews?
  • Olaf van der Spek - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    The 650i uses 21% more power on idle compared to the ICFX3200. What is nV doing with all that power? This seems absurd.
  • Gary Key - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    quote:

    The 650i uses 21% more power on idle compared to the ICFX3200. What is nV doing with all that power? This seems absurd.


    It is being channeled into the on-board Flux Capacitor. ;-) I can tell you that we have hounded NVIDIA to no end about this issue with their chipsets. It should be addressed when they finally go to a single chip solution later this year (we are still hoping this occurs).
  • Frumious1 - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    If I were to venture a guess, NVIDIA probably isn't doing any proper power savings work for the chipset. Just like with CPUs and GPUs, there's a lot of stuff on the chipset that is often not in use and can be put into a sleep/deep sleep mode. The 650i and 680i use 100-107W more power at full load than at idle. The 975X uses 141W more at load, P965 139W more, and RD600 105W more.

    IIRC, AMD is using a newer process technology for RD600, so that would help explain their lower overall power. Intel seems to benefit from power savings in idle mode, but at full load they are pretty close to NVIDIA. The extra "stuff" in 680i relative to 650i could easily account for the added ~10W that it requires. Seems to me like all companies involved could do more with chipset power savings. AMD is just ahead on the process tech (again, I think); Intel uses an older process but decent power saving circuitry; NVIDIA doesn't do anything to conserve chipset power.

    When you consider that at idle the PC is doing nothing important, AMD and Intel should drop CPU clocks further (600 MHz ought to be enough), and they could drop FSB/bus speeds and chipset voltages as well. Why run 1066FSB when you're doing essentially nothing? Why run 1000MHz HyperTransport to transfer... nothing? I believe AMD does drop HT speeds at idle on their mobles chips, so why not on desktop offerings?

    Just my two cents.
  • WT - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    Patiently awaiting the Gigabyte version of this board, as I was most interested in upgrading to the 965DS3 board rev 3.3, but the 650 look like it is worth the wait. Also, since the C2D price drop isn't until late April, I have time to wait and make a decision once that board is available. Good read as usual guys !
  • ghitz - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link

    Exactly what I was thinking !!
  • nicolasb - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    Maybe this was mentioned in part 1 and I missed it, but how does the 650i perform in terms of heat output? And how effective/noisy is the north bridge cooling on the MSI board? And how does the overall power consumption of the system compare to P965? The 680i certainly runs very hot indeed compared to its Intel rivals;I think need to know if the 650i does the same.
  • Gary Key - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    Power consumption numbers are on page 9. Thermals are a different story as they will vary widely depending upon the case design and internal cooling. The best I can do is to setup a 650i and a P965 on a test platform and take readings without any airflow across the boards. I will do that tonight but from the touch of your finger testing, I figure the 650i is about 15% warmer on average. The fan that MSI includes has a db rating of 34 and did not sound whiny in testing.
  • nicolasb - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    I think we need to know, even.
  • Geraldo8022 - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    Yes, this is very important to me and I also would like the answers to these questions.
  • phusg - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    Guys I agree it's very important but please RTFA first ;-)

    From page 9 power consumption you can conclude that the 650i uses some 10-15 Watts less than the 690i.
  • phusg - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    Additionally if idle is more important to you then the P965 seems to nose in front, if load is more important then the RD600 chipset seems to be king. Unfortunately only DFI has a board at the moment although I think ASUS is rumoured to be preparing one too.

    And as far as noise goes I think all these motherboards are passively cooled, so they should be pretty close to 0db.
  • yyrkoon - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    First, let me get this out of the way:

    quote:

    It may turn out that this chipset doesn't deliver a knock blow to the P965 but instead to the 680i in most cases.


    Last page second to the last paragraph, I'm assuming you meant 'knock-out blow' ?

    Now that, that is out of the way, is it just me, or does it seem that MSI is/has been encroaching on ABIT, and like companies as far as stability goes ? I personaly have not owned any MSI motherboards for quite some time, but everytime I read about their boards, it seems to be getting more, and more favorable for them.

    Now a question concerning functionality. Will this SIL eSATA chip handle SATA Port multipliers well ? Would be a very good option if so. Also how many PCIE lanes do these boards actually use vs the i680 boards ? I remember seeing a spec sheet of the 590 vs the 570 (which if I recall correctly, was half the PCIE lanes, 590 vs 570 that is) but I do not recall seeing any data concerning the i680 vs its little breathren.
  • Gary Key - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    Hi,

    It should have been knock-out blow and is corrected now. On the front page we linked to our 680i launch article that explained the technical differences between the chipsets - http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">680i Launch - but to answer your question quickly the 680i has 46 PCI Express Lanes and nine links compared to 18 PCI Express Lanes and four links on the 650i SLI. The specs on the SIL3531 can be found here - http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?...">SiL3531. The chipset has support for Port Multipliers with FIS-based switching such as their own SiL3726 chipset.

    MSI over the last couple of years had lost their focus to some degree in the motherboard market and it seemed as though they either wanted to product low cost boards to compete against ECS/Foxconn or high-end boards in their Diamond series. You never knew what to expect from them when a new chipset was released. They were also getting a bad rap for being late to market along with getting the board finally tuned correctly about the time production ended on it. I know from several discussions with them over the past couple of months that they are aware of past issues and are vigorously working to correct those issues now. Product quality has always been good overall but has certainly become better as of late while pricing is still aggressive based upon feature sets.

    Thanks for the comments.
  • yyrkoon - Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - link

    Thanks for the reply Gary.

    Am I right in assuming that just because a given chipset has x mount of PCIE lanes/Links, that <insert OEM> motherboard manufactuer is not obligated in using all of these lanes /links ? IF this be the case, how would one go about finding this information out, without reverse engineering the motherboard ?
  • just4U - Wednesday, March 21, 2007 - link

    Odd is it not? They used to be first to market in alot of boards and had to constantly fine tune after launch because they were riddled with issues. I've always liked MSI and usually purchase a few of their boards each year.



Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now