Trying out MSI's X58 Pro

A friend of mine requested me to build his personal computer. He will be using it mainly for gaming as well as photo and video editing. The budget is quite small but he wanted a system that will be i7-based since he purchase one at a much cheaper price than what the local stores are selling.

Motherboard selection time! I considered 3 motherboards namely: MSI X58 Pro, XFX x58 and Intel Smackover board. Considering the possibility that my friend will run on dual video card in the future (and that he is an Nvidia Fanboy), Intel Smackover was scratched from the list. MSI and XFX can both handle SLI and Crossfire technologies, soooo, which is which?

I searched through some forums and noticed that some complaints are on XFX’s boards in terms of BIOS update and other technical support. So this broke the tie and I was left with MSI as the obvious choice. There were also complaints about MSI. The IOH temp is very high, some say as high as 70oC! I had high temperature experiences with my eclipse but after doing some minor modifications, such as removing the crappy violet thermal interface, putting AS5, as well as replacing the push pin with bolt & nut, the temperature readings I’m getting on my IOH are only at 47o-49oC which is very tolerable since Tylesburg can handle up to 100C.

So I went and got the MSI X58 Pro. I was able to strike an agreement with the store manager that if I was not satisfied with the board, I will return it within 3 days and get another board, if not another item. Ha ha! The bartman is playing safe!!!

The board was already in my possession but my friend said that I will get the rest of the parts in 2 weeks! Given my agreement with the store manager, I went on to test the board out of my own components.

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...%20Pro/box.jpg

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...20Pro/mobo.jpg

This x58 pro comes with 2 native x16 pcie gen 2 slots which can support crossfire but I have read in several forums that a simple BIOS update can enable SLI on this board. There is another PCIe at the bottom part with a lighter blue colored port but it is only on X4 mode. There are additional 2 PCIe X1 and 2 PCI slots which can be used to add additional cards like PCI TV tuner or maybe an add-on x1 PCIe sound card.

The board comes with the same blue and black ddr3 slots as its big brother MSI eclipse. The PCB however, is somehow similar to MSI’s P458d Memory Lover motherboard. The processor socket was well laid out and I did not expect any issues even if I put a market cooler instead of intel’s stock cooler.

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...%20Pro/IOH.jpg

MSI still used their latest “split design “. I have read several complaints about this in different forums (not on this board but on MSI Eclipse board which uses the same split thermal design technology). Let’s see later what the verdict will be on this Split thermal of the X58 pro which actually has only 1 heat pipe vs Eclipse’s 2.


http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...ro/idesata.jpg

The SATA and PATA ports are at 90 degrees which is a big plus for me. I hate messy cables in my PC and with this, you can easily line up sata and pata hdd’s and drives with just enough knowledge on cable management.

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...Pro/switch.jpg

Even at entry level on the x58’s I was surprised that MSI added the power and reset switches. What I do not like about this is the Clear CMOS switch. I would prefer to have it at the back of the board. Having this inside will mean that I need to open the chassis side panel everytime my overclock attempt fails, especially if I don’t want to wait for the board for its 3rd attempt before going to its CMOS default.

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...20Pro/back.jpg

At the back of the board we can still see the legacy PS2 keyboard and mouse connector. There are 6 USB slots, an optical out, esata, firewire and a gigabit Ethernet port. The board is also equipped with built-in audio which can easily be configured up to 7.1 channel.













Setup, stability and benchmarking time! I will be pairing this board with i7 920 C1 stepping and a tri-channel team extreme dark ddr3 rated at 1600Mhz. I didn’t have any ATI card on hand but I had my 2 “old” but reliable MSI 8800GTx 768mb 320 bit. I didn’t want to remove my 9800gtx+ from my main PC (since my wife uses it from time to time). I looked around my stuff and noticed a couple of Western Digital WD740ADFD Raptor with 16mb cache. I was too lazy to do raid 0 setup so I just did the conventional 1 hdd and one optical drive for my test.

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...8%20Pro/i7.jpg


http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...20Pro/team.jpg

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...ro/8800gtx.jpg

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...ro/raptors.jpg


http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...seupraptor.jpg

I will not go thru all the BIOS stuff but will just show you the HW monitor and the Cell Menu (for overclocking purposes).

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v.../HWmonitor.jpg

HW monitor Tab displays the current temperature of the CPU, IOH and system. It also gives the current rpm of the fan when connected to the 4 pin header (cpu) and 3 pin header for system fans 1 and 2. HW monitor also displays the current vcore voltage as well as the 3.3V, 5V and the 12 V readings.

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...0Pro/BIOS1.jpg

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...0Pro/BIOS2.jpg

Cell Menu is MSI’s overclocking tab. This tab will let you let you adjust the becessary things needed for you to achieve a good overclock system.
http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...Pro/X58sli.jpg

With the default BIOS, I set up windows vista and the latest 182.08 nvidia driver. I cannot enable SLI. What I did was requested MSI to send me an updated BIOS that supports SLI. After a few hours, I received an email and attached was the latest beta BIOS. I flashed the BIOS and was able to see the option to enable or disable SLI in the nvidia control panel tab!

I initially encountered some issues on overclocking and later found that the issue was again caused by high IOH temperature. The temperature was at more than 70 degrees! I removed the IOH heat sink and replaced the violet thermal interface material that MSI used with Artic Silver 5. I also replaced the pushpin with small bolt and nut and my temperature dramatically went down! And that’s not the end of it! I added a small 40mm fan and that solved my temperature issue!!

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...IOHPushpin.jpg

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...o/IOHScrew.jpg

After this, I did the tweaking for at least an hour, I was able to make the system run at 4.0Ghz! I have done some benchmarking and below are the results :

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...o/SPIstock.jpg
SPI 1M @ 2.66Ghz = 15.297s


http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...0Pro/spi4g.jpg
SPI 1M @ 4 Ghz = 10.343


http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...pcm05stock.jpg
PC Mark 05 @ 2.66Ghz = 10024

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...0Pro/pcm4g.jpg
PC Mark 05 @ 4Ghz = 12414


http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...3dm05stock.jpg
3dmark06 @ 2.66ghz = 17055

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...ro/3dm054g.jpg
3dmark06 @ 4ghz = 22353

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...ntagestock.jpg
3dmarkvantage @ 2.66Ghz = 8136

http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...tage4gcopy.jpg
3dmarkvantage @ 4ghz = 15074
http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...amarkstock.jpg
Aquamark @ 2.66Ghz = 107,742




http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/v...aquamark4g.jpg
Aquamark @ 4ghz = 181,707


Final Thoughts and Conclusion ]

After doing some tests, I was surprised with the capability of this cheap entry level X58 board from MSI. I was able to overclock the system @ 4ghz which is more than 50% of the stock speed of my i7 920. I think it can still do better than 4Ghz but I don’t want to end up burning my personal 17 processor. I will only allow +0.20V added to the stock vcore. Also noticeable is that my team extreme ddr3 1600 can run @ 1600 on both stock setting and overclock setting which is pretty hard to do on my Eclipse board. Bottom line, this is the that board I will use for my friends i7 setup! (No need to go back to my newly found friend "the store manager")

Pros :
- Cheap Entry level X58 Board
- Easy to overclock
- Support SLI and Crossfire
- No issue on Bigger aftermarket CPU cooler
- 90 degrees placement of SATA port
- Technical Support is a bit faster when I requested the SLI BIOS


Cons :
- IOH temp still high. Need to put 40mm fan!
- No SLI Bridge included in the Box

That is the most disgustingly coloured PCB I've seen for a while.

On th other hand, allright results and a nice writeup :)

Yeah I agree. That is ugly color for the board. Its a poo brown LOL.

But nice results

Here is what I found and bought while looking for an X58 PRO hehehehe. Model name is “X58PRO-E” and this was introduced to solve the High IOH Temp that other users encountered before with the X58 Pro. The chipset & VRM heatsinks are now screwed on the board thus making a good contact for better & fast heat dissipation. Don’t get worried also for the price because this would be still around 10k PHP and if paired with a good i7 920 processor (priced around 13-14k PHP) you will own a system which would be great for video editing, graphics processing & gaming as well (SLI or Crossfire can be done on this motherboard ^^ ). On the other hand, if you are an overclocker like me. It is very easy for the board to overclock the i7 920 to 4ghz at a minimal voltage increase and few bios tweaking.

So here is a shot of the box and its contents
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...E/BoxAcsry.jpg

•Four Sata Cables
•One IDE Cable
•Two Molex to SATA power Adapters
•1x Cross Fire Bridge
•Front Panel header labels
•Driver & Extras CD
•User manuals & Backplate

Features

•Support for Core i7 LGA1366 CPUs at 4.8-6.4GT/s QPI
•Intel X58 northbridge and ICH10R southbridge
•Six 1.5V DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 24GB of memory
•One Realtek RTL8111C Gigabit Ethernet controllers
•Three PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots (x16/x16/x4)
•Two PCI-EXpress x1 slots
•Two PCI slots
•Seven SATA II ports - six from Intel ICH10R (supporting Intel Matrix RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD), one from JMicron JMB363
•One IDE port supporting one device from JMicron JMB363
•One eSATA port from JMicron JMB363
•Ten USB 2.0 ports - six on rear I/O, four via pin-outs
•JMicron JMB381 IEEE1394a Firewire supporting two ports - one via pin-out, one on the rear I/O
•Realtek ALC888S 7.1 Channel High-Definition audio codec

Layout & I/O Ports
[img width=360 height=480]http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c393/gzhil/Netess/X58PROE/chipsinks.jpg[/img]
[img width=360 height=480]http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c393/gzhil/Netess/X58PROE/BackPCB.jpg[/img]
Black heatsink screw design. Three well placed PCIE (x16/x16/x4) slots which won’t give any users a problem installing three dual-slot video cards. You will also find below the Easy OC Switch sticker are the Easy Power/Reset/ Clear Cmos Buttons & beside them is the OC Switch.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3.../backports.jpg
On the rear you will find 6 USB Ports, Firewire port, E-SATA, SPDIF Out , PS2 for KB & Mouse, Gigabit LAN & lastly 7.1 audio ports.

BIOS
I only took pictures of the Cell Menu because this is the most important part of the bios especially in overclocking. This is where you will tweak your system.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...PROE/bios1.jpg
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...PROE/bios2.jpg
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...PROE/bios3.jpg
CPU Specifications

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...PROE/bios4.jpg
Memory Specifications

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...PROE/bios5.jpg
More Memory Options for Tweaking

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...PROE/bios6.jpg
Voltages

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...PROE/bios7.jpg
This is where you can save all your overclock or tweak settings

Test Setup
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...PROE/Setup.jpg
•Intel Core i7 920 C0
•G Skill Trident 2000 CAS9 1.65V
•MSI 4770
•FSP 800 watts PSU
•Seagate 500GB SATA
•Windows Vista Ultimate 64BIT SP2

Below are quick short tests on how good the board can handle high memory clock speeds even though in the manual it only says there that the highest OC for the memory speed is up to 1600mhz only for the motherboard.

[imgh=600 height=480]http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c393/gzhil/Netess/X58PROE/Tridents16006-7-6-18TRFC60158V.jpg[/img]
G Skil lTridents 1600 6-7-6-18 TRFC60 1.58V

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...TRFC65160V.jpg
G Skill Tridents 1866 7-8-7-20 TRFC65 1.60V

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...TRFC80165V.jpg
G Skill Tridents 2000 8-9-8-20 TRFC80 1.65V

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...TRFC88172V.jpg
Tridents 2100 9-9-9-24 TRFC88 1.72V

I was able to get a good bclock 222 also with the i7 920 C0 I have. I guess if I used a D0 stepping instead , I can push the bclock higher.
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...OEBclck222.jpg


I was very impressed on the capabilities of this entry level X58 motherboard can do. A few tweaks on the cell menu I was able to get high memory clocks and all were stable. You would also notice on one of my shots running the memory @ 2100mhz, my uncore ratio turned to a high of 4200mhz speed. All of these were done all on air.

Question with this particular board remains long term reliability...

^^^and MSI end user "support".... The main reason I went to Gigabyte...