MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard Review

Utilities & Features
The MSI 890FXA-GD65 comes with a whole slew of utilities, most of which you probably won’t use, so we’ll list them all, but only cover the important ones.

BIOS Code Unlock
This simple program will allow you to unlock the CPU cores on your processor and choose whether to have your Core’s controlled manually or automatically. The cores are automatically controlled by default, so if you want all your cores accessible at all times then set it manually, otherwise the software will control it for you, depending on your processing needs.

MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard

Control Center
Control Center is probably going to be where you’ll be spending most of your time.  Along the left side are three dropdown menus including System Information, Overclocking and Green Power. System Information will give you details about your mainboard, CPU, and memory; most of which information can be found by a program like CPU-Z. The Green Power Menu will show your voltages and some other PC health statistics including how much power you can be saving.

MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard

The Overclocking menu allows you to choose from four settings, Default, Cooling, Cinema and Game in which the software will automatically overclock your system for the desired application. You can also manually change the voltages and memory timings if you so desire. However, if you want overclocking for the lazy, just simply enable the OC Genie Lite, which will automatically set the optimal overclocking settings for processor, memory and overall system performance.

MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard

MSI Live Update 5
The final important utility is the MSI Live Update 5, which will give you all the updates you need for drivers, BIOS and utilities. The Home screen will give you some basic computer information, including your last scan date and how many items need fixed. The Live Update tab will allow you to do a manual scan or automatic scan for everything related with this motherboard, most of which you won’t need as you can see from the automatic scan that I ran.

MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard

The History Tab will show you anything that you’ve downloaded and everything related to that download. The Settings Tab will allow you to change the frequency that the Live Update notifies you for an update, by default it’s pretty often (e.g. every time you startup your computer).

MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard MSI 890FXA-GD65 AMD 890FX Motherboard

The Utilities that we didn’t cover are as follows: Super-Charger, Teaming Genie, Video Genie, and Easy Viewer.