MSI, while not quite as big a brand name as Asus, is a Tier 1 manufacturer in its own right and has made some great products in the past. One good thing is that it's always adhered to reference designs issued by chipset makers.
The P6NGM is no different in this respect. It follows the reference design for MCP73PV and sports a GeForce 7150/nForce 630i chipset with support for Intel LGA 775 processors (Core 2 Duo) alongside an FSB of 1333 MHz and two single-channel RAM (DIMM) slots that can take up to 4 GB of DDR-800 of RAM. The chipset, as we mentioned, is the GeForce 7150/nForce 630i.
This is the flagship model in this range, which consists of MCP73PV, MCP73S and MCP73V. The intrinsic difference among the lot is that the MCP73PV has support for native HDMI/VGA, the MCP73S comes with DVI/VGA/ HDCP support, and the MCP73V is the low man on the totem pole with support for either DVI/HDCP or HDMI.
Perhaps the first thing that caught your attention was the term 'single-channel'. Yep, this board has no support for dual-channel and hence is actually a step backward in chipset design. Dual-channel support has become common over the past few years and its omission does hurt the board a bit. We shall examine this issue in our performance section.
The graphics on this motherboard is powered by the newly introduced GeForce 7150 chipset, which supports a maximum of 256 MB of RAM. While this may seem inadequate, where this chipset shines is the native presence of HDMI. PC connectivity is offered via a normal VGA slot. The motherboard also has a single PCI x 16 slots which allows for an external card to be connected for increased graphical support.
The rest of the board’s specs are pretty much standard, with two PCI, one PCIe x1, 4 SATA 3.0 Gbps ports and one IDE. In terms of audio, the chipset used is the Realtek ALC888 codec. It has native support for 7.1 and is hence a welcome feature.
The board layout is pretty clean, with a nice blood-red PCB and clean lines. There is adequate space in relation to peripheral connectors, which prevents clutter when all of them are utilized at the same time. In other words, the wires get room to 'breathe'.
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