Product Reviews

MSI's G95MDH motherboard works with any Intel LGA775 processor. It has GMA X3000 onboard graphics, so it's a good choice if you're not interested in games and don't need an external sound card. It has an analogue D-sub output, but there's no DVI option. We had trouble running Call of Duty 2 in Windows Vista as the game crashed, telling us there was a problem with DirectX 9c. Neither the latest graphics drivers nor a fresh installation of DirectX 9c fixed the problem, although we had no trouble with the Aero Glass interface, which also uses DirectX 9c. We had no problem when we installed our ATI Radeon X1950 Pro in the PCI-E x16

The board has four memory slots, which support up to 8GB of DDR2 533 or 667MHz, or 4GB of DDR2 800MHz RAM. That's still plenty for any operating system, though. The memory slots are set quite close to the PCI-E x16 slot, so a long graphics card can make it difficult to install or remove memory.

This is the first motherboard we've seen to use a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip. If you have Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, you can use the TPM chip to encrypt your hard disk. For those with other operating systems, the TPM chip provides no benefit.

There's plenty of room for storage thanks to the six SATA2 ports. As you'd expect, this can be used in a RAID array. Other expansion options include four USB2 ports, PCI and PCI-E x1 slots, 10/100/1,000 Ethernet port and FireWire. Oddly, the rear of the board also has a serial port, which is unlikely to be used.

We were very pleased with the G965MDH's performance in Windows, as it achieved some of the highest scores we've seen. With support for all Intel's latest processors, including the quad-core Core 2, it's a powerful motherboard. Budget buyers, however, are advised to buy an Intel 945G-based board.