MSI 785GM-E65

INTRODUCTION

It is very hard to live without a computer in this digital world we live in. In fact, I bet that many people actually have more than one PCs. It is common to find at least one desktop PC and a laptop in any household and many households even have one dedicated PC as a home entertainment system.

A lot of the home entertainment systems uses integrated graphics because the system is designed to simply output ditial images to the TV and not for gaming. Motherboards with integrated graphics have come a long way. They used to be cheap boards that often got integrated into system builder and OEM manufacturers to cut down the costs. Over the years, motherboards with integrated graphics have matured to a point where if you do not game at all, they are a very good board for day-to-day use. The graphic chip that is bundled with the motherboard often will be sufficient for most people whose primary task is browsing webs, watching movies, and working. They are even good enough to play some games at low resolution. All of the current motherboards with integrated graphics also support DirectX 10, making them a good choice for HTPC for being fully supporting Microsoft Windows Vista and even the upcoming Windows 7.

On August 3rd, 2009, AMD launched 785G and chipset, an updated version of their popular 780G chipset. The 785G is essentially the same 780G with a few upgrades, which makes it an even better chipset for the HTPC user.

The biggest enhancement for the 785G would be its updated graphic controller base on the HD 4200. Most noticeably, improvements over the older 780G chipset would be the UVD 2.0 support for full MPEG-2/VC-1/H.264 hardware acceleration, DVI and HDMI output, and HDCP encoding. The chipset also supports DirectX 10.1 so it would be fully ready for Windows 7. Something unique about the new chipset would be the dual-stream PiP technology on Blu-ray 1.1 playback with multi-monitor capability. The new chipset also made an upgrade to HDMI 1.3 from 1.2.

Although there is a rumor that the chipset will support LPCM audio over HDMI, the information has been confirmed that the chipset in fact does not support it. Neither does it support the TrueHD and DTS-HD audio bit-streaming. A true HTPC user may find it quite disappointing to see these options missing. To give some credit, other competitive chipsets such as NVIDIA GeForce 8300/9300 does not support the TrueHD and DTS-HD Audio over HDMi either but the chipset does support 8 channel LPCM bitstreams audio.  

The graphic chip, HD 4200, on the 785G has the same numbers of stream processor (40) as the HD 3200 found on the 780G. The stream processors are running clock speed of 500MHz. However, the new chip features AMD's PowerPlay technology which will reduce the clockspeed to as low as 60Hz when the GPU utilization is low. This will saves power consumption, which is something that HTPC users would appreciate.

The chipset also supports AMD's SidePort technology where up to 128MB of flash memory can be used. This will reduce the need for the IGP to share with the system memory. Also, the hybrid CrossFire is supported but only when it is paired with the older HD 3450/3470 video cards.

The chipset communicates via a 2.0 GHz HyperTransport link and will support the latest AM3 socket processors. It is native PCI Express 2.0 with up to 22 PCIE 2.0 lanes and four PCIE 1.1 lanes between the two bridges. The 22 lanes would be split into a single x16 for the graphics card and six x1 lanes for expansion slots.

Along with the new 785G chipset, AMD has also released the SB710 chipset. It is essentially the SB750 without the support for RAID 5 array. It supports six SATA II ports in RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 configuration. A single ATA channel is also supported, twelve USB 2.0, and HD audio. Noticeably missing is the native network port so the chipset would have to rely on third party. The lacking of RAID 5 is probably not going to cause a major drawback for this chipset as the board is most likely be targeted toward HTPC users than power user.