Conclusion

Clearly the 770-C45 is not going to blow you away with special features and lots of gadgets; that’s not its purpose. Instead, it is able to provide all the standard features and settings that combine, with a few extras to form a decent low-priced AM3 motherboard.

For users not used to overclocking in the BIOS, the easy overclock switch allows for up to a 20% FBS increase that still allows less experienced OC'ers to gain a performance boost without being confused by the array of settings in the Cell Menu tab.

The BIOS, is essence, is relatively plain and simple but this is not a bad thing as the features are not over complicated making them easy to use. In terms of overclocking headroom we seemed to hit a buffer at 3.8GHz but this seems to be the case with many AMD processors and in any case that sort of overclock is not to be sniffed at.

With the Phenom II X4 955 have a DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller it’s great to see the 770-C45 being compatible with both versions of memory even if the latter is limited to 1600MHz.

However, the lack of PCI Express x16 slots makes dual graphics card configurations a no-go area which is a little disappointing and some of the layout isn’t brilliant. For example, the easy overclock switch gets swamped by any reasonably large graphics card making it hard to adjust.

The absence of both Firewire and eSATA ports too is a little disappointing and the colour scheme is not the most appealing compared with the black, blue and aluminium layouts we’ve seen before from MSI.

However, this budget board doesn’t do a bad job. Sure, it’s missing a few bits and pieces that could have improved it somewhat but on the whole it gets the basics right and allows some decent - for a board of this cost - overclocking headroom. All in all you can’t ask too much more of an AM3 board priced at just £60.

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Thanks go to MSI for providing us with this motherboard.

This review was syndicated on tech seed.