MSI ProSeries AMD A320 1st, 2nd, 3rd Gen Motherboard review

MSI ProSeries AMD A320 1st, 2nd, 3rd Gen Motherboard review

MSI ProSeries AMD A320 1st, 2nd, 3rd Gen Motherboard review

today our hoops take a look at the msi a320 m - a pro max edition keep reading to find out what okay so today we're taking a look at a massively cost effective motherboard from MSI this is the a320 M - a pro max edition now the upgraded version of this the max edition is basically to counteract the problems that AMD have had with their CPUs effectively there's too many all on the same socket platform the m4

platform so unfortunately you can't always get all of the chips to work on all of the boards so MSI and other vendors have increased the size of the bass chip so allow all of those sk use to be added to the BIOS so with this board you should find that once you've got your processor got all installed it should fire up straight away without the need to backdate BIOS ears or have an updated boss all those kinds of things I obviously that will chose this video has been recorded in

January 2020 so obviously if you're watching this later and they've released new processors then you may still need to update your BIOS there will be a link in the video description to the latest bars files let's tell you which processors are compatible exaggerate cetera so if you need any information click on the links below so this board as it stands at the moment is compatible with m4 processors from the Roizen 3 1200 right the way up to the heady heights of the Roizen

939 50x obviously I wouldn't necessarily recommend pairing this particular board with that processor if you're spending that kind of money on a processor then hey why not treat yourself to a slightly more high-end board but technically this will work with and will work absolutely fine it has been validated by MSI and it's compatible to work but where I feel this board actually does serve a really good purpose is in anywhere up to around about these 65 watt mark so anything up to a risin 530 600 will be absolutely perfect combined with this motherboard

now the price point at the moment this at the moment is retailing the UK on amazon which i think is a phenomenal price obviously do check the links below prices will fluctuate but essentially this is a really really budget board that will allow you to get a system up and running and if you're on a particular budget say for instance you've got I don't maybe to spend on a motherboard and processor with this if you spend in

one bite 4250 pain motherboard that leaves you to get a processor so you could splash out and get Roizen or tentatively if you wanted to go the other way around it you could maybe get a verizon for writing by the hundred planes mark then spend on something like a tomahawk max board and arguably you'll have pretty much the similar performance although the Roizen 530 600 will be the better performer but you won't be able to overclock it on this chipset so again it's swings

and roundabouts so it depends where you want to spend your money and where you see value actually in your system anyway that's enough waffling all about that let's take a look at the box we'll take a look at the motherboard and we'll have a discussion about where I think this fits in the market so looking at the box first of all as it says on there MSI a320 m8 Promax it's also got the certification on the bottom so this is really important if you're building a newer system with the Roizen 3000 series you want to be looking for this on the board so this says MD Roizen 3000

desktop ready if you're looking again a 3000 series chip make sure it's got this on the box now one thing to bear in mind obviously if it has the 3000 desktop ready version on it you can pretty much guarantee it's gonna work with the 2000 series and the 1000 series straightaway so no issues there as you can see it's also the a320 chipset which is a entry-level chipset and does come with limitations but gain as I said this will work with pretty much every AM 4 processors on the

market currently so depending what your expectations are or what your planners do with the system this may or may not hinder you so on the side of the box we've got the logo game for the motherboard also we've got the supported chips so we've got a series on athlon x4 chips we've also got 1st 2nd and 3rd generation and the Roizen chips we've also got poisoned with Radeon Vega graphics and also we've got Athlon with Brady on Vega graphics so that ticks all the boxes

quite literally moving around to the side pretty much the same deal and on the back of the board engaged into a little bit more detail about what the motherboard supports and some of its specialized features so running from the top left we've got the ddr4 boost and it supports ddr4 up to 3,200 speeds in the OSI mode overclocks obviously most of the Rison processors and Athlon processors will support up to ddr2 666 straight away but if you want to OC or enable

your XMP profile this will support XMP profiles up to ddr4 3200 speeds moving down to audio boost a audio boost on this particular board were using the realtek ALC 8-9 2 chipset which supports up to 7.1 surround sound now to get 7.1 surround sound you will have to involve your front panel headers on the back of the motherboard there's any three outputs so if you wants to add those extra channels you will need to do some creative wiring with these front panel

connectors but essentially it's a high quality audio solution and is isolated from the rest of the board as we see on a lot of more high-end boards moving down further we've got core boost so this is essentially the kind of precision overclocking all that kind of thing precision boost so the motherboard actually even though is a low-end board will support those features on modern chips so you can squeeze a little bit more performance sides a bit if there is Headroom available

both thermally and electronically I'm moving on to the turbo m2 now this board actually has one MDOT to slave slot which supports both PCI Express and also SATA drives so if you want to add one of those in there no problems whatsoever a nice feature of this because that part of the chipset is separated from the other SATA connectors you don't have to worry about if you plug in us nvme drive or MDOT to drive you lose one of your SATA ports that isn't a problem on here you still get full access to all four of your SATA ports okay so all let's get a 4-iron

actually take a look and see what we get now because this is the ProSeries this is essentially designed it con professionals enthusiastic all that kind of thing so you don't get a massive amount of kind of retail packaging in here it is very very limited again going back to the price point you wouldn't really expect much more than that so we've got the motherboard itself which will come back to analytic where let's take a look at some of the accessories which run

included so you get the usual deal you get the MSI driver disk you get a pair of SATA connectors you get your i/o shield thank you for choosing MSI product sheet you get a very quick quick installation guide at MDOT to screw the actual other part of that is already on the board already MSI gaming logo which you can stick on to the front of your PC should you feel the need okay so here is the board itself now as you can see this is a micro ATX form factor so

this will work in micro ATX cases ATX cases not idx cases sadly you would have to spend considerably more to get anything on the AMD platform to fit ITX case but this can be fine for pretty much every other case on the market so let's go through some of the connectors and the features and we'll start from the top left so in the top left we've got our CPU additional power connector and this is only a four pin connector which again kind of belies the the reasoning

behind not really running higher-end chips purely because of the power of delivery you've got a three-phase vrm on there which again isn't particularly great for power delivery looking they have standardized it and said that the Rosen 939 50 X will run on here so power delivery connections or not it is compatible which is quite surprising moving for the rank we've got our CPU fan header at the top and next up we've got a pair of ddr4 Schloss now this supports up to 32 gigs of DDR Ram so two 16s which should be enough for most systems moving down slightly

we've got our ATX power connections as a 24 pin connection so moving down we've got first of our two SATA connectors now these are SATA 3 or 6 gigabit or second connectors so those you can connect up pretty much any SATA drive you choose slightly across from that we've got our m2 slot which supports also said nvme PCI Express drives or a standard SATA Drive so you put those in there you've got wide selection of mounting holes there so even up to the biggest

2211 size drivers you can fit those in there and the mounting screw is actually already fitted if you want to put a smaller drive in just undo the screw and move it to the appropriate size moving down further we've got our front panel connector and then also we've got a couple more of our Santa connectors there's a USB 3.0 gem one connector for your front panel headers and a company in that is two standard USB 2.0 ports so if you want to add some extra USB is on the back you can go ahead and do that next up we've got our chassis intrusion connector

followed by our TPM connector or trusted platform module then we've got our audio front panel connector and a comm port should you wish to connect up some sort of serial device next time we've got our isolated audio using Japanese capacitors great same quality there and as I said that is using the realtek ALC 8 9 to 7.1 surround sound chip moving across slightly we've got our PCI Express x 1 port and PCI Express x 16 port for graphics cards and this is Gen 3 so all gen 3 cards are fine you could buy a gem for card in if he wants to but you probably won't

get the full bandwidth by it's a bit but these days most setups aren't really pushing the pci express x 4 to its limit anyway so that should be fine again due to the kind of low-priced entry-level board that this is I can't imagine many people put in sort of 2080 tos and that kind of thing on this particular board although again you can do if you wanted to moving up slightly we've got our rear chassis fan header and next that is the jumper for shorting out your CMOS

so should you try doing some English that the board doesn't like you can just short that across or remove the boss battery to reset there's the BIOS next like we've got our BIOS battery and then we've got our V RMS and our capacitors and obviously this section here in the middle is for your am 4 processors as we discussed massive wide range of a.m. for compatible processors for this board so let's move on to the i/o which is going to be quite important to a lot of you so

starting from the left-hand side we've got a keyboard and mice port which is always nice to see especially if you're getting problems with the USB keyboard nothing else games BIOS that kind of thing sometimes that purple connector can be a real lifesaver next like we've got a DVID HDMI now with the DVID depending on what resolution you're running out about tops out in 1920 by 1200 so if you want to use a 4k monitor with this using an APU then you will need to

use the HDMI port next that we've got four of our USB 3.2 gem 1 ports also another 2 USB to ports a Gigabit LAN which is real tech eight one one one H and then we've got our three audio connectors so you've got your microphone headphone and line outs and that pretty much sums up all the ports on the board on the back of the board some slightly strange feature which I don't really quite understand still and I've read about it and I still don't understand it so maybe

you guys doing if you do here in the comment section we're in the back here we've got this case standoff keep out zoom which is pointing to this little piece here now I'm assuming this is because on a lot of chasis cases when you get them first of all sometimes the pillars are actually pre-installed so if you've got a pillar which is in the kind of ATX side you'd want to remove it so that is like an area to say look there shouldn't be a pillar here at least that's what I see miss for

they did make a big thing about it on the website and I'll be honest - I still don't fully understand it okay so that pretty much wraps up the the features ports of connectors on the motherboard this is a really old one it's such a low price but yet contains so much compatibility for office pcs video editing pcs general-purpose pcs this boards can be excellent MSI boards are generally very good especially on the kind of the beef 350 p450 chipsets they were known to be

exceptionally good and I don't think this one's going to be any different what it comes down to is your expectations if you're going to be in so overclocking where you want to get into overclock in this board is definitely not for you but if you want to build a reliable system where you can just attach everything turn it on and not have to worry too much about all the extra settings they go on in the background this is going to be absolutely perfect and as I mentioned a little bit earlier 90% of all PC users don't overclock or tinker with their pcs so for 90% of users

this board is going to be right up your street from the 10% that one overclock then you're gonna have to spend a little bit more money so for me personally I'm going to be pairing this motherboard with a Roizen 320 200 G and we're going to use is just like a media sensor straight kind of entertainment system so that is going to be always amused for there's no need for overclocking it's got the HDMI out so we can connect up to our 4k TV so this board in our

particular instance is gonna be absolutely perfect low cost gets you up and running and does the job which you can't really ask for more than that so this has been the msi a320 m - a pro max open mic this is my unboxing on reviews in how to and hopefully we'll catch you in the very next review thanks .

MSI ProSeries AMD A320 1st, 2nd, 3rd Gen Motherboard review

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MSI A320M-A PRO MAX

ModelBrandMSIModelA320M-A PRO MAX
Supported CPUCPU Socket TypeAM4CPU TypeSupports 1st, 2nd and 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen / Ryzen with Radeon Vega Graphics and 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen with Radeon Graphics / Athlon with Radeon Vega Graphics and A-series / Athlon X4 Desktop Processors for Socket AM4
ChipsetsChipsetAMD A320
MemoryNumber of Memory Slots2×288pinMemory StandardSupports 3200/ 3066/ 3000/ 2933/ 2800/ 2667 MHz (by A-XMP OC MODE)
Support DDR4 3200(OC)/ 2933(OC)/ 2667/ 2400/ 2133/ 1866 MHz (by JEDEC)Maximum Memory Supported32GBChannel SupportedDual Channel
Expansion SlotsPCI Express 3.0 x161 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slot:
1st, 2nd and 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen: Supports x16 speed
Ryzen with Radeon Vega Graphics, 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen with Radeon Graphics, A-series, Athlon X4: Supports x8 speed
AMD Athlon with Radeon Vega Graphics: Supports x4 speedPCI Express x1PCIe 2.0 x1 slot
Storage DevicesSATA 6Gb/s4 x SATA 6Gb/sM.21 x M.2 slot (Key M)
Supports PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA 6Gb/s:
- 1st, 2nd and 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen
- Ryzen with Radeon Vega Graphics
- 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen with Radeon Graphics
Supports PCIe 3.0 x2 and SATA 6Gb/s:
- AMD Athlon with Radeon Vega Graphics
- A-series
- Athlon X4
Supports 2242/2280/22110 storage devicesSATA RAID0/1/10
Onboard VideoOnboard Video ChipsetSupported only by CPU with integrated graphic:

1 x DVI-D port, supports a maximum resolution of 1920x1200@60Hz
1 x HDMI 1.4 port, supports a maximum resolution of 4096x2160@24Hz

Only support when using the processor with Graphicss
Maximum shared memory of 2048MB
Onboard AudioAudio ChipsetRealtek ALC892Audio Channels7.1 Channels
Onboard LANLAN ChipsetRealtek 8111HMax LAN Speed10/100/1000Mbps
Rear Panel PortsBack I/O Ports1 x DVI-D / 1 x HDMI / 1 x LAN (RJ45) / 2 x PS/2 / 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 / 3 x Audio Jacks / 4 x USB 3.2 Gen 1
Internal I/O ConnectorsOnboard USB2 x USB 2.0 connectors (supports additional 4 USB 2.0 ports)
1 x USB 3.2 Gen1 connector (supports additional 2 USB 3.2 Gen1 ports)Other Connectors1 x 4-pin CPU fan connector
1 x 4-pin system fan connector
1 x Front panel audio connector
2 x Front panel connectors
1 x TPM module connector
1 x Chassis Intrusion connector
1 x Serial port connector
1 x Clear CMOS jumper
Physical SpecForm FactorMicro ATXDimensions (W x L)9.3" x 7.9"Power Pin1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector
1 x 4-pin ATX 12V power connector
FeaturesFeaturesSupports 1st, 2nd and 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen / Ryzen with Radeon Vega Graphics and 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen with Radeon Graphics / Athlon with Radeon Vega Graphics and A-series / Athlon X4 Desktop Processors for Socket AM4

Supports DDR4 Memory, up to 3200 (OC) MHz

Turbo M.2: Running at PCI-E Gen3 x4 maximizes performance for NVMe based SSDs

Audio Boost: Reward your ears with studio grade sound quality

X-Boost: Software that auto-detects and allows you to boost the performance of any storage or USB device

Core Boost: With premium layout and fully digital power design to support more cores and provide better performance.