MSI FM2-A75-E35 review

The board has MSI’s great Click BIOS II UEFI setup interface, which has powerful and comprehensive overclocking and configuration settings. Your CPU’s temperature is always displayed, as is the motherboard’s, and you select categories of options by clicking panels located at either side of the screen. You can also choose between three profiles: Eco mode, Standard mode and OC Genie II mode. Eco mode is a power-saving profile, standard mode lets you adjust settings manually, and OC Genie II chooses safe and reliable overclocking settings for your components.

OC Genie II overclocked our components modestly, setting our CPU’s frequency to 4GHz from its native 3.8GHz, our memory to 1680Mhz from 1600Mhz and the built-in GPU’s frequency to 840MHz from 800MHz. Our system remained stable and the overclocked setup scored 68 overall in our multimedia benchmarks. That isn’t a great increase, but it did give make our setup a snappier system.

OC Genie II is a great way of giving your system a slight overclock if you aren’t confident with overclocking or don’t want to do it yourself. You can also overclock manually and save separate overclocking profiles, as well as adjust the voltages of your CPU and memory.

The MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 is a great motherboard for enthusiasts on a budget, or those needing to build a compact PC who still demand lots of configurability, and it wins our Budget Buy award.