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You'll probably notice that this is the only ATI chipset motherboard in this group test. This is partly because RD580 motherboards are thin on the ground, and secondly because I believe that anyone with CrossFire, or considering CrossFire will want to go down the Core 2 Duo route – something SLI users don't currently have the option of.

What is frustrating is that there is no physical limitation to this board actually working in SLI, and the same goes for any Intel chipset Core 2 Duo boards, yet nVidia nSists on keeping a tight grip on SLI as a platform solution.

Initially, I was going to exclude this board from the group test because both the samples we had received were pre-retail samples (although you would never know it). But at the last minute MSI sent down the final revision, so that we can be sure we are testing what you will getting as a customer.

Unlike nForce 5, which was created entirely for the AM2 platform, RD580 is available on Socket 939 and I looked at it here. However, there is no reason why this had to be done, nForce 4 would have worked just as well. So ATI has taken the cheaper route of just putting RD580 straight on to AM2. A big complaint of RD580 was ATI's south bridge, which has now been replaced with SB600, which is considerably better. Performance was admirable in our testing, keeping up with the nVidia offerings.

The layout of this board is good, and very similar to several others on test. The DIMM slots run vertically along the board, with the floppy, IDE and 24-pin connector on the right hand edge. A little further down on the right, we have four SATA connectors, staying as close to the south bridge as possible.

Both the north and south bridge are passively cooled, for silent operation. I found the north bridge to get a little on the hot side, so if I was overclocking, I'd want to make sure it had plenty of airflow. There are three fan headers and one of these is thoughtfully labelled “NB_FAN”.

There are two x16 PCI Express graphics slots, with two x1 slots in between. This spacing means more breathing space for the graphics cards – especially needed if you're running dual slot cards.

At the bottom, we have two PCI slots. Only one of these will be accessible if running a dual slot machine.

On the back panel, I was surprised to see the inclusion of a parallel and serial port. These are increasingly rare to find on a motherboard. We also have PS/2 ports, a FireWire port, four USB 2.0 and twin Gigabit Ethernet. Audio is provided by the Realtek ALC883 chipset, and we have both optical and coaxial S/PDIF output, as well as five analogue connections.

Also included are two brackets, giving us an extra FireWire port and two extra USB 2.0 ports.

The MSI BIOS was an absolute pleasure to use. It was basic, but functional. Most of the fiddly options where kept together in one single place, the Cell Menu. Although strangely, altering the four key memory timings was kept somewhere else in the BIOS – that was annoying.

Base frequency was adjustable from 200 to 400MHz. Voltage adjustment was just adjusting the VID pins of the CPU, but there was also an option of increasing it by up to 23 per cent. On most CPUs, that will be around the 1.65V mark.

I took this board up to the 300MHz mark without any problems at all. It was quick and easy and didn't involve any fiddling around to get it to do so.

Verdict

This board is good value for money, performs well and overclocks admirably, with everything in one convenient location. If you're after CrossFire, this is definitely worth considering.

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