MSI G33M and K9NGM3: new MoBos on integrated chipsets
Layout and Features
Both the motherboards have one shortcoming in the design: the latches of DIMM slots are blocked by a PCI Express video card. But for value boards aimed at operation with the integrated video core that is not a flaw but a design feature. Also, in view of the low price, we don't think of the inconvenient positioning of the additional power connector on the G33M board as a shortcoming.
The fundamental difference in the design is that the board G33M uses two bridges (north and south), whereas K9NGM3 - only one chip.
Both the motherboards offer the integrated graphic core and allow for use of an external video card which is installed into the PCI Express x16 slot.
The configuration of the remaining slots is identical for both the motherboards: each uses two PCI slots and one PCI Express x16 slot.
To cool the north bridge, both the motherboards use only aluminum radiators without fans.
Each of the boards also uses four 240-pin DIMM slots for DDR2 memory modules, with the overall supported memory capacity being 8 GB (DDR2-533/667) and 4 GB (DDR2-800).
The MSI G33M uses the south bridge ICH9 which supports four SerialATA II lines. We should point out here that G33M has one more modification with the south bridge ICH9R which supports six SATA lines and RAID features. On both the modifications, a couple of ports is brought over to the rear panel to plug in external SATA devices.
Besides, MSI G33M uses the additional Marvell 88SE6111 controller which provides support for one ParallelATA and one SerialATA lines.
As regards MSI K9NGM3, it implements support for ParallelATA with the chipset, with no additional controllers installed onboard.
Then, both the chipsets (G33+ICH9 and NVIDIA 7050) support 12 USB2.0 ports each. On the G33M, all the 12 have been implemented: six ports on the rear panel (with four installed within a massive box), and six additional. The K9NGM3 has only 10 ports implemented: 4 on the rear panel and 6 additional ones.
We also note that the motherboards use a Firewire controller implemented as a VT6308P chip made by VIA. This chip supports two Firewire ports: one on the rear panel, with the other one being additional.
Both the motherboards have the High Definition Audio subsystem, with similar ALC888 chips used as codecs.
A few words on the network support: both the motherboards use a high-speed (Gigabit Ethernet) LAN controller. However, the chips used are different: on MSI G33M it is Marvell 88E8056, and on MSI K9NGM3 - Realtek RTL8211BL:
The board's rear panel is of the following configuration:
Note that on the boards in question the engineers at MSI gave up support for one of the COM ports and a LPT port. Among the special traits, we should point out the nonstandard box for four USB ports, two external SATA ports on G33M, and a HDMI output on K9NGM3.
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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