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MSI G31TM-P35 review



Test setup and overclocking


G31TM-P35 G31TM-P35



Test setup

Processors Pentium D E6300
Pentium D E6700
Athlon   II X2 240
Phenom II X3 710
Motherboard I MSI G31TM-P35
Motherboard II ASUS P5G41-M
Motherboard III ASUS M4A78-VM
Motherboard IV ASUS M4A785D-M PRO
CPU Coolers Intel stock cooler
AMD stock cooler
Cooler Master Hyper TX2 (one fan)
Cooler Master Hyper TX3 (one fan)
Hard disks 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 HD103SJ
1.5 TB Western Digital WD15EADS
Memory A-DATA 2X1024MB DDR2 800MHz
Corsair 2X1024MB DDR2 667MHz
OCZ Platinum 2X 2048MB DDR2 PC2-8500
Video Cards XFX Radeon HD3650 512MB
XFX Radeon HD5750 512MB
OS Vista home Premium 32 bit
Windows 7 professional 32 bit
Windows 7 home premium 64 bit


Overclocking

There are not many overclocking options in the BIOS, the vCore for example cannot be changed. Voltage adjustment for the ram and chipset is also unavailable. The only things you can do is adjust the Front Side Bus of the CPU and alter the FSB/DRAM ratio to speed-up or slow down the memory. Another thing is the absence of overclocking profiles.

Before you start overclocking don't forget to disable the Intel EIST and also disable the Spread Spectrum.

We used an Intel Pentium Dual Core E6700 3.2GHz CPU and a Cooler Master Hyper TX2 CPU Cooler for overclocking, the memory used was 2x1GB of A-DATA 800MHz DDR2 RAM. Our previous attempt with an E6300 and an ASUS G41 board resulted in an 18.5% stable overclock. Raising the FSB with 20% and running HyperPi was succesful. After a few trials and errors we had a stable overclock @3854.9MHz, BCLK @321MHz. This is a 20.4% overclock on a G31 board even and better than the the 18.5% we achieved on the ASUS G41 board. In general a 20% OC result can be considered as mediocre, but on the other hand you'll have to bear in mind that this is a very cheap mainboard with hardly any overclocking options.

E6300 overclocked @3318MHz


MSI Dual Core Center


MSI Overclock Tool


With the MSI Dual Core Center you can overclock a CPU in realtime, next to that you can also adjust the CPU fan speed if your motherboard supports it. This tool also makes it possible to have various overclock profiles.

Easy OC Switch

Turbo Key CPU-Z


Unlike the ASUS Turbo Key, which can be used with a 'closed case' by just pressing the power button, you'll have to open the case to set the switches. In the diagram below you can have a look at the options.

Easy OC Switch options diagram


We tried the 266 --> 333MHz switch settings, which resulted in a crash after a minute or so. The Easy OC Switch is perhaps good for marketing this board, but is in our opinion pretty useless. It would have been better if MSI had chosen more realistic OC settings like 266 --> 300MHz or perhaps indications like 10% instead of MHz.

On cheap motherboards from ASUS Turbo Key 'really works', allthough the overclock result you'll get is very limited.

More expensive boards from MSI have the OC Genie button, this tool is an itelligent way to figure out an 'automated overclock' and seems to work pretty well.



  1. Introduction
  2. Bundle, box and gallery
  3. Motherboard Specifications
  4. BIOS screenshots
  5. Bundled software
  6. Test setup and overclocking
  1. CPU and Memory benchmarks
  2. Rendering
  3. Compression
  4. Graphics
  5. Power consumption
  6. Conclusion


        



Intel G31 logo

  1. Introduction
  2. Bundle, box and gallery
  3. Motherboard Specifications
  4. BIOS screenshots
  5. Bundled software
  6. Test setup and overclocking
  7. CPU and Memory benchmarks
  8. Rendering
  9. Compression
  10. Graphics
  11. Power consumption
  12. Conclusion

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