 So today I'll be doing an unboxing of a product that I've been meaning to have a look at for quite a while This is the MSI 770 G 45 so it's part of their G series or their gaming series you can see they've got a big red G here That's what that means and it has a couple of features that are pretty good First of all it has full support for AMD's phantom 2x4 And it also has full compatibility with Windows 7 it has their green EUP technology included you know I'm actually gonna have a quick sort of zoom in here so that you can actually See what I'm talking about here now this board also like most of the 700 series chipset boards from MSI has support For the brand new phantom 2x6's although that's not marked on the box You just need to make sure you update the BIOS With your board before you will get support for that so down here you can see it's a m3 CPU ready Which we've already been through comes with some kind of Norton software supports lossless 24-bit audio it has their easy OC switch which while it's not quite as nice as their OC Genie It's still a pretty useful little thing it's got active phase switching which gives you power savings So that means that while this motherboard has a certain number of phases to provide to the power under peak load it can actually Reduce how many power phases it's using at idle to make sure that you're using less power at idle because fewer power Phases means less wasted power also it features MSI's unlock CPU core technology stable unlock So like so many AMD boards these days there is support for unlocking the extra cores in AMD's x2 and x3 CPUs that are artificially reduced for sale so here on the back. We've got Mostly the same stuff the active phase all solid capacitors So that's a big one that they've actually got on the back here And I'm going to just sort of zoom in again here, and it also has support for mFlash This is a feature that was missing from MSI boards for a long time And now we're finding it almost across the board allows you to flash the BIOS without a floppy drive or or using you know bootable USB drives or anything like that you just throw USB drive on the back of the motherboard And then you boot up to the mFlash utility and you can flash the BIOS just like that Inside the motherboard box we will find a variety of things as per the usual arrangement So let's see what we have first of all we have the IO shield Okay, color-coded for your convenience next we have the drivers and utilities DVD do not use that Download the latest off the MSI website then we have a quick installation guide, and there doesn't appear to be anything Particularly quick about it. It's quite large. It's not too bad actually here Let me just unzoom a little bit so you can see how big this guy is I'm going to turn off my mother or my monitor so you don't have to contend with that at the back focusing So it shows you how to install the CPU RAM drives graphics card Around to the other side front panel headers the power Setting up the BIOS installing the OS and installing the drivers and utilities very nice kind of walks you through the whole process I mean really building a computer is not that hard these days the manufacturers Cats in the garbage bin make it so easy for us. Okay here. We have the user guide. This is the Europe version That's interesting check that out Europe version Nice there in the garbage again. Sorry bear with me here get out of there Okay, garbage can has been relocated right there Okay, so inside the user's guide. We will find many different languages So the actual English portion is only about well. It's not that thick It's only about this much English English English, and then it goes on to do it just like that Okay, so next we've got one IDE cable One say the cable and then one will X to say the adapter that is a fairly bare Accessory package as far as cables go, but if you're anything like me you've probably got about 50 SATA cables lying around anyway Let's just get this motherboard opened up here All right, so layout layout is a pretty standard sort of fair you've got all of your so far I noticed that the power adapt or the power connectors are in their ideal location So your four pin power is up at the top left of the board exactly where it belongs, and then you've got Your am3 socket, so I'm just going to pull this sticker off So you can have a better look at the am3 socket along with the am3 socket You will also get support for dual channel DDR 3 just like all of the CPUs that run on the am3 socket will require Then along to this side of the board we've got our 24 pin connector exactly where it belongs We've got a fairly beefy looking heatsink on the northbridge chipset, okay, then moving down. We have an IDE port Okay, so that's a side mounted one for easy access, and then we have kind of a strange arrangement of the SATA ports So here we've got four right angle SATA ports and then two normal Facing right out of the board SATA ports, so that's a kind of a strange strange decision But I think I see why they made it Because these two or rather these four connectors could potentially be interfered with by a full-length graphics card Whereas this one is not nearly as bad down here. We've got We've got three USB headers, and then we've got our front panel connectors over here We can see the overall layout of the board is quite desirable So we have one PCI express 1x connector up at the top Then we have two PCI express 16x and three PCI so if you actually install two dual width PCI express video cards you'll be left with one PCIe 1x and then two Or rather one PCI slot so that's pretty much your optimal configuration there And then we've got the easy OC switch so it actually comes with instructions written right on the board Which is pretty nice so here I'm just going to zoom in even more there and try and position this so you can see what I'm talking about so the easy OC switch has instructions right here, so it says hmm default is on One and two and then 10% is one up two down 15% is one down two up and then 20% overclock is flipping both of these switches down now Let's have a look at the I O connectivity on the back, so we've got two ps2 ports, and this is an odd one We've got a serial port so I guess this motherboard could potentially be used for industrial applications because so many peripherals that are used in sort of industries that aren't quite as up to speed as the technology industry so something like you know mining or Many many different industrial applications will still need a serial port we have six USB 2.0 ports no USB 3.0 support on this board It's a relatively value minded board then we have a gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1 audio support, so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the MSI 770 G45