880GMA-E45 is made of high-quality components, including shielded capacitors, which gives an impression of robustness and reliability even before the motherboard is mounted into the case. On the other hand, the motherboard is truly packed, which caused a less-than-likeable layout.
First and foremost, the memory slots are placed too close to the CPU socket, which isn't such a problem if two modules are used (the slots are to be filled from the outside inwards), but can make a nightmare out of installing all four if using a massive CPU cooler. Furthermore, the 4-pin voltage connector is placed almost in between the CPU and the graphics card slot, so if you ever install a separate graphics card, quick removal of this connector will be rendered impossible (although one may dispute the need for quick removal of such a connector, agreed).
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Positive features are much more numerous, though. The northbridge here is AMD's 880G, which supports all current AM3 socket CPUs, whilst also having a very usable integrated graphics core. Radeon HD 4250 (RS580) has 40 stream processors (comparable to 8 CUDA cores on NVIDIA GPUs), four texture and four ROP units, working at a default clock of 560 MHz and able to “borrow” up to 512 MB of memory from the system RAM (the default setting is 256 MB). This chip is obviously no gamer's choice, but it's still a very good multimedia solution, since the motherboard also contains an HDMI output for transferring image and sound to a compatible HD TV set. On the other hand, owners of a couple of monitors won't be too happy to hear that the integrated GPU only supports one digital output at a time, which means that it's impossible to use HDMI and DVI at the same time; instead, all you can do is connect one of the monitors to an analogue output. The 880G northbridge theoretically supports the installation of a separate side-port memory, to be used by the GPU exclusively, but MSI has decided to omit support for this feature on this particular model, so the GPU will be forced to rely on system RAM. Those who already have a separate graphics card such as a Radeon HD 4350 or 4550 will be able to combine it with the integrated GPU in CrossFire mode, gaining not so much in speed as in power savings. The southbridge is AMD's SB850, containing a SATA III controller (6 GB/s), while the motherboard also has two NEC's controllers in charge of providing USB 3.0 support, making sure that users are well-equipped for future disks and devices for years to come.
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