MSI 945GM3 Motherboard

The Vista compliant MSI 945GM3 motherboard for Intel Dual Core has an FSB of

1066/800/533MHz and comes with two DDRII memory slots and 4 SATA II ports for

expansion. It has graphics onboard and supports 7.1 channel HD audio. There are

also 3 PCI slots and one 16x PCI Express slot for expansion. With this

configuration, it is a typical mid-level motherboard.

We used Intel Core2 Duo at 1.8 GHz, 1GB RAM and 120GB HDD to test the board.

We also used onboard Intel 945GM Express graphic. The board ticked an overall

score of 2098 on the PCMark 05 and 310 on 3DMark. This is much lower than the

similar spec ASRock Conroe945G-DVI (reviewed in Oct, 2006 and scored 4822 and

654 respectively). With CineBench9.5 to test the dual core performance by

running image rendering with two cores separately, it scored 155CB-CPU for the

single core and 288 CB-CPU for both the cores. Here also it was out-performed by

ASRock Conroe945G-DVI, which scored 489 pps for single core 906 pps for single

and double cores respectively. POV Ray scores clocked 207.95 pps for single core

and 413.79 pps for both the cores.

BOTTOM LINE: For the average performance that this board showed, it is

over-priced. You can get a better performing board like the ASRock

Conroe945G-DVI for only around Rs 4500.

Stephen Tunglut