MSI 970 Gaming Motherboard Review: Undercutting AM3+ at $100
by Ian Cutress on January 22, 2015 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- MSI
- Vishera
- AM3+
MSI 970 Gaming Conclusions
Regardless of the conclusions derived from the new FX-E series of processors from AMD, they see the $600 PC gaming market as a vibrant source of sales and upgrades. When it comes the FX-8320E and FX-8370E, their argument is always about performance to an equivalent costing Intel build, or that these CPUs offer an upgrade path to those still running FX-4000, FX-6000 or even Phenom II based CPUs. The only downside for MSI in that logic is that by upgrading a CPU, the user is not upgrading the motherboard, which is what MSI would rather happen.
The 970 Gaming is aiming at that cheaper market, by providing a motherboard suitable for single GPU gaming and an FX-8000 series processor. Very few motherboard manufacturers are actively pursuing this demographic, perhaps because margins are low or the numbers simply are not there. But what is available from MSI certainly looks the part. As their Gaming branding has evolved since 2013, it is clear that user perception of experience, rather than perhaps the experience itself or the technology behind it, comes in to play. Placing a user inside that MSI Gaming ecosystem, such as the styling, the forums and the atmosphere during a period of time when they cannot afford the big name and big performance parts allows them to develop an affinity for the brand and hopefully drives the bigger sale down the road.
For a motherboard under $100, it was going to be basic, but there are a couple of additions over the norm worth highlighting. The Killer networking solution, especially as a marketing tool, has worked well for MSI in the past and gets a showcasing here. This comes along with the enhanced Realtek ALC1150 audio solution which I would imagine MSI gets very cheap as it is used across most of the self-build motherboard range. The 970 chipset limits the user to a single NVIDIA GPU and PCIe 2.0, but for a $600 gaming system any dual card arrangement or at high resolutions is probably not on the cards, so the lack of x8/x8 or PCIe 3.0 is not a big loss.
Looking at the performance, if we directly compare the FX-8320E overclocking results of the 970 Gaming to the 990FX Extreme9, the latter has the headroom for another 100 MHz peak but also costs almost double. The 970 Gaming has a few downsides, such as offset-only overclocking and a lack of load-line calibration options, but it will provide a decent manual overclock when it needs to. The OC Genie seems dependent on the CPU being used, and while it failed with the FX-8320E, the FX-8150 had no issue at all.
Benchmarks threw up a couple of yellow flags, with some results being a lot lower than expected but the rest were higher than the Extreme9 by a few percentage points. USB speed, THD+N and DPC latency are lower than expected, but POST times are par for the course. Peak power consumption was the same as the Extreme9 within margin, but the 970 Gaming idled several watts lower.
To put it bluntly, the 970 Gaming has a few flaws. At $100 we were not expecting perfection, and while it achieved a little more than a $190 motherboard did in a few benchmarks, it was quite a way behind in others. But the gaming-positive styling, the MSI Gaming ecosystem and the couple of technical improvements over the base specifications can make up for this a little. We reserve awards for motherboards that execute near-perfectly for their price range, and while the MSI has a lot of room to improve, it offers a very interesting element for the new AMD FX system builder to consider.
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Stuka87 - Thursday, January 22, 2015 - link
I am actually in the market to replace my old Phenom II system (965BE @4GHz with an HD7950). And as nice as the price is for newer AMD stuff, even at the same price the performance is just not there for gaming. Too many games are poorly coded and only use two threads, so even with my current CPU two cores sit there doing nothing. With an 8320e, 6 cores sit there doing nothing. And the IPC improvements from Phenom II to current FX chips is marginal at best.Its just disappointing that gamers basically HAVE to go Intel to run any current games decently.
JarredWalton - Thursday, January 22, 2015 - link
It all depends on what you're trying to run. A very large number of games are going to be GPU limited, so much so that it really has no meaning what CPU you're running unless you're at medium to high quality settings in order to boost frame rates. We could also trot out Mantle and DX12, which should make the CPU matter even less -- but only on games that use those APIs, which is not the vast majority of games out right now or even coming this year.So yeah, if you're buying a new motherboard and CPU, it's hard to find a reason to buy an FX chip right now. If you already own one, you don't necessarily need to upgrade, but that's a different matter.
Stuka87 - Thursday, January 22, 2015 - link
Mantle is a huge boost. BF4 is near unplayable for me in multiplayer with DirectX, but runs "ok" in mantle (average 45fps, CPU limited with all four cores pegged). In that game an 8 core FX would help a lot. But then you go to a Blizzard game like Heroes of the Storm, and I am stuck with 2 cores pegged. A low end i3 outperforms my system (and FX systems) in these cases by quite a large margin.eanazag - Thursday, January 22, 2015 - link
Blizzard games always seem to be CPU heavy. It enables them to run the software decent on almost any kind of hardware. They build for Macs and many use the Intel IGP.Alexvrb - Thursday, January 22, 2015 - link
This is true and in some ways Blizzard's engines are very well optimized. They don't lean too hard on the graphics (at least at fairly moderate settings) and they look good even if you don't have a fast enough system to crank on all the eyecandy. They run well on systems with few cores, too. Both of these things tend to make them fairly laptop-friendly as well. But they're not very well threaded and the downside is that if you've got a system with relatively low per-thread performance and 4+ cores you're often going to have an unnecessarily poor experience as it simple can not take advantage of your setup.piteq - Friday, January 23, 2015 - link
I will jump in here with a question. Considering myself a WoW player and AMD supporter (that's a weird combo for sure ;-) ), I look for some options to upgrade my Phenom II X4 965 (3,5 GHz, it's not OC-ing well) and Radeon 6790 /w 1GB GDDR5 (which is noisy…). I realize, the improvement won't be huge, but I think about: Vishera 8320E, some mobo (Asus M5A99X EVO R2.0? Or maybe there are better ones for the price) and some much more silent GPU (R7 265 / R9 270? Or maybe there's something not much more expensive and better?). Do you think I will notice some justifable difference? :)HappyHubris - Friday, January 23, 2015 - link
From a X4 965 you really have no viable upgrade path.According to Anandtech's benchmark, upgrading from a X4 965 to FX 8320E would give you
HappyHubris - Friday, January 23, 2015 - link
From a X4 965 you really have no viable upgrade path.According to Anandtech's benchmark, upgrading from a X4 965 to FX 8320E would give you less than 10% improvement in average FPS:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/102?vs=698
It looks like a Haswell i3 would be quite an upgrade, based on the SB i3 performance vs. AMD parts:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/62
piteq - Monday, January 26, 2015 - link
Thank you! Eh, seems AMD marketing should never, ever show WoW results to anyone ;) Ineed, if not i3, then i5 seems to much more sensible path, especially it's not THAT more expensive thank 8320E. Well, it's just a weird, very bad for AMD case, still…FlushedBubblyJock - Sunday, February 15, 2015 - link
Buy a GTX970, you're done.