MSI 760GMA-P34 review

The MSI 760GMA-P34 is an AM3+ micro-ATX motherboard that measures 243x228mm. It supports AMD’s FX, Phenom II, Athlon II and Sempron processors and uses the AMD 760G north bridge chipset and SB710 south bridge chipset.

This chipset is a budget one and a little less sophisticated than other AM3+ ones. It particular, it supports a limited number of SATA3 and USB3 ports. On the 760GMA-P34, there are only two SATA3 ports available compared to its six SATA2 ports. Given that only SSDs can really use the full speed of SATA3, this limitation shouldn’t prove too much for most users.

There are also only two USB3 ports on the back panel, but thankfully a further two are available through the board’s internal header. You’ll also find four USB2 ports, two PS/2 ports for a mouse and keyboard, VGA and DVI-D display ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three 3.5mm audio jacks. This is a good range for a micro-ATX board.

The 760GMA-P34’s main disadvantage is that there’s not a lot of room for expansion due to its small size. The 760GMA-P34 has a PCI-E x16 slot that conforms to the PCI Express 2.0 standard, a single PCI-E x1 slot and a legacy PCI slot, but that’s it. The latter will also be obscured if you install a graphics card, leaving you with just the PCI x1 slot if you want to install another card such as a USB3 card.

You don’t have to install a graphics card, as the AMD 690G chipset has built-in Radeon HD 3000 graphics, with both VGA and DVI outputs. The graphics chip’s not well suited to games, but fine for general Windows tasks and for playing video.

The 760GMA-P34 can’t hold much RAM, as its pair of DDR3 memory slots has a maximum capacity of just 16GB. This will be plenty for most users, but bear in mind that it will only support modules with default speeds up to 1,333MHz. It is possible to overclock them up to 1,866MHz in the BIOS, but we found that the BIOS was very old-fashioned and fiddly to use if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

We were pleased with the 760GMA-P34’s performance, as it scored 88 overall when we ran our multimedia benchmarks using an AMD FX-8350 processor and 4GB of RAM. This is exactly what we’d expect to see from this setup.

The MSI 760GMA-P34 is a decent AM3+ board with good performance, but if you want a few more SATA3 ports and expansion slots, the £10 more expensive Gigabyte 970A-DS3P is a better buy, although you’ll need to use it with an external graphics card.