Finals Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
MSI has a truly terrific offering with the MSI A88X-G45 Gaming edition. It is feature rich, it a perfect symbiosis with AMDs Kaveri APUs and it just is a gorgeous motherboard to look at. Herein lies a bit of a danger, as everything about the MSI A88X-G45 Gaming edition breathes high-end and enthusiast, but the Kaveri APUs really are mainstream offerings. I mean make no mistake here, Kaveri APus have a lot in store. I've been working with an A10-7850K APU and this motherboard for a few days now and it's an excellent APU for generic desktop PC usage. Combine your setup with a nice SSD and the OS feels incredible snazzy and fast. But the reality remains that these setups are intended as mainstream PCs and are excellent solution for HTPCs. But yeah, good stuff. MSI upgraded this Gaming edition with KillerNIC and it all is impressive really. Power consumption is low, it has all the features you wish for, including; a wide array of display connectivity, a Gigabit LAN jack, eight SATA 6Gbps ports and so on.
Performance
So the danger for the success of the APU on the Desktop PC platform remains the lack of raw processor power. The IGP inside the APU is leading and highly programmable. OpenCL and anything compute related is exactly where this APU shines. Gaming wise a migration of the architecture to GCN is a very clever step as well. With mediocre settings you can actually play games at 1080P, but please do pair it with fast DDR3 memory though, as the iGPU is very dependant on system memory. So yeah, you can even play game at 720P and some even at 1080P if you consider flicking down image quality settings, and that's progress alright. Realistically, if you build a PC for everyday usage like browsing and perhaps Photoshop a thing or two, then it's all good really. The Kaveri APU also excels with its updated video engine and all the multi-monitor output lovin' this APU offers, AMD simply wins hands down opposed to anything Intel has to offer. Overall the MSI A88X-G45 Gaming edition offers baseline performance, and when you flick the OC Genie button, you'll get a decent automated overclock to 4200 MHz on all cores (depending on your choice in APU of course).
Power Consumption
TDP wise AMD has given the A10-7850K a TDP of 95W which we roughly measured. Idle power load is low overall we feel that power consumption is not bad at all, especially when you take the IGP into account. This motherboard consumes les than 40 Watts in idle, and that was merely with an SSD attached.
Aesthetics
An all black and red design, and even with the board stuffed to the brim with hardware the PCB remains clean looking. Combined with Military class V design components, the Gaming series will offer you a good grade class motherboard with enthusiast options like, USB 3.0, SATA3 ports and sure, the cutest and smallest little mainboard that actually looks real good.
Is anything missing?
Yeah, where's WIFI? Especially AC WIFI is getting extremely popular. It's a bit of a miss in my opinion.
Concluding
Any Kaveri APU based system will be will be hard to beat in terms of features and overall performance, the 7850K used in this motherboard review is an excellent and affordable APU for a HTPC or a mainstream Windows 8.1 PC. Gamers with a high-end dedicated graphics cards will however require a little more in terms of raw processor performance. But if enough games get supported, Mantle might be the magic that AMD needs to happen and solve that need. The motherboard itself rocks though, this is close to enthusiast grade hardware with the usage of high-grade components. The Gaming boards not only looks sturdy, they are just that. The baseline performance and tweaking experience will be on par with any other brand though, that is the reality of these products anno 2014. But MSI did pimp up this motherboards with enhanced audio, KillerNIC, eight SATA 6G connector, OC genie, Status LED, ambient lighting LEDs, power buttons and well everything you need is there. We do miss WIFI and in specific IEEE 802.11ac, I feel that anyone with a high-end PC should upgrade their router to IEEE 802.11ac compatible as well as the motherboards having this WIFI as standard. The MSI A88X-G45 Gaming edition motherboard offers nice performance has some great features and even offers tweakability (albeit AMD APUs are a tough nut to tweak). We really like the latest implementation of the UEFI BIOS as that now has come to full cycle and works really well. Overall a truly nice motherboard, just like the rest of the MSI gaming series. Definitely recommended. At the time of writing this article the product was not yet available in the stores though, hence we do not know the street price just yet.
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