MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 Motherboard Review

Included Software

Now that we have the motherboard unpacked and installed, let’s take a look at some of the software utilities that MSI has included with the 790FX-GD70.


The driver and utility disc auto-launches a simple menu system reminiscent of that included with ASUS products. All of the essentials are included as far as drivers are concerned, including Audio, Chipset and Network drivers. Several MSI utilities are included, that we’ll outline below as well as AMD’s popular new “Overdrive” application.
MSI took the opportunity to market some of their other products in the “Product Information” and offers a 60-day free trial of Norton Internet Security 2009.

GreenPower Center


One very interesting and powerful application included with the GD70 is MSI’s GreenPower Center. Put simply, it is a monitoring and power management control application. The application is essentially two components: System information and GreenPower control. The “System Info” tab provides basic information like basic motherboard, CPU, VGA and Memory specifications. Detailed PCI BUS assignments can also be found in this area.


The second “GreenPower” section of the application is very interesting. There are two power control modes available: Basic and Advanced. Under the basic control page, there are essentially three power profiles that can be selected to optimize board power consumption. The first “Default” profile is basically profile that does not attempt to conserve any electricity via the GD70’s “APS” or “Active Phase Switching” features. The other two, “Optimize” and “Max Power Savings” appear to be just about identical as far as their behavior. Upon activating either of them, we noticed several of the board’s LEDs go out – indicating reduced number of power phases - as well as a greatly reduced CPU fan speed. At times of heavy load, the board will reengage the disabled power phases. Buyers can keep an eye on actual amounts of electricity conserved based upon statistics reported by the application as well.


In the “Advanced” GreenPower menu, greater control is granted, and each of the profiles can be modified individually. Parameters like number of CPU and memory power phases can be selected as well as several voltages. Buyers not fond of bright blue LEDs on their motherboard can also disable them or change their behavior within the application.
Overall, we found the GreenPower Center application to be very handy and pretty powerful. We should also mention that we had nothing but trouble with the version of this application that was included on the Driver CD. Numerous non-descriptive error dialog boxes would shoot up randomly and some of the system information was just flat out wrong. As soon as we upgraded to the latest version on MSI’s website, the application worked perfectly and was very stable.

Overclocking Center


Another nifty application included is MSI’s “Overclocking Center”, which works a lot like a trimmed down version of AMD’s Overdrive. Aside from the same basic system information that we saw in the “GreenPower Center” tool, the application allows various different overclocking and voltage profiles to be specified. Simply configure the profiles using the “Advance” tab, and then launch them by clicking “Load”. Although the program isn’t terribly attractive in our opinion, it certainly couldn’t be any easier to tweak your system within Windows.

MSI Live Update 3


Another included feature that may not be quite as interesting to enthusiasts is MSI’s “Live Update 3”. As the name suggests, “Live Update” simply sits in the background and periodically checks for updates of MSI’s utilities, BIOS revisions and drivers. The tool works as advertised, although we were disappointed that it didn’t find the latest versions of “GreenPower Center” and “Overclocking Center”. We had to manually download them from MSI’s website. Overall, this is a good tool for novice users who prefer a “Windows Update” kind of interface rather than having to search out drivers and utilities manually.