Lowest DRam voltage settings on modern AM3 boards?

Question

Greetings all,
while I am considering an Intel socket 1156 motherboard for the next machine mainly because I want to reduce idle power consumption/wastage, I'd like to know whether MSI socket AM3 motherboards support low voltage memory. Can it be lowered to 1.25 volt? I'm not averse to specifying DRam parameters in the bios if need be. The memory kit I had in mind is the 1.25v Kingston HyperX KHX1333C9D3UK2/4GX.
Considering the native SATA3 support on the 850 southbridge, an AM3 would also be a great excuse to get a Crucial RealSSD, wouldn't it?

Answer 1

While I can't answer the Dram voltage question I can speak to the MOB question in general. I was forced to buy a new MOB this summer due to a liquid cooling accident that killed my liquid cooled ASUS M4A-79T deluxe. I tried a Gigabyte 890FXA UD5 MOB and was not happy with some of it's features so I returned it for an MSI 890FXA-GD70. As a systems engineer with decades of experience I consider this board to be the best laid out of all the current AMD 890/850 supporting MOBs that also support USB 3.0 and SATA 3. I am currently liquid cooling this MOB - North and South bridges, MOSFET voltage regulators, and Kingston HyperX performance 2133MHz memory with built-in liquid cooling. AMD 965 BE CPU has been running liquid cooling since day one using Swiftech Apogee GTZ liquid cooling block. After working with this board with liquid cooling blocks I am even more convinced it is the best laid out of this series of AMD 890/850 MOBs out there! If you are still waiting to pull the trigger you may want to consider this MOB. It is neither the cheapest nor the most expensive of the MOBs by the big 3, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, but I have found it to be a good board so far. To your question of power if you look on Tom's HW web site you'll find comparisons of like Intel vs AMD CPUs. While the Intel's are a bit faster in most area's, not all- check the bench marks, the AMD CPUs do well against the Intel's power consumption wise and if you OC your systems as I do, I can beat the Intel machines standard operating CPU clock speeds in speed and for 1/4 of the price. I got to 4.2 GHz without bothering to stretch this system at all(I don't stretch a system until I've finished cooling the MOB's North+ South bridges and MOSFET areas. You mentioned you like to keep your systems for a long time, well so do I, baring accidents I generally keep a system for at least 5 years and during that time they still perform reasonably well. I still have a 1999 Slot A MSI MOB system that will work using XP OS, does run a bit slow because of 3/4 GB memory limitation.
One last final comment about the Intel MOBs that support USB 3.0: they have a tendency to not do the USB 3.0 well  due to PCI E lane limitations on the Intel controllers.