MSI Sneak Peak

MSI Preview - 890FXA-GD70

Published: 19th March 2010 | Source: MSI | Author: Tom Logan

MSI Sneak Peak

MSI Sneak Peak

Recently OC3D were lucky enough to be invited by MSI to get a glimpse of their latest two motherboards, one for the X58 platform and one for the AM3 platform. Thanks to some careful "it's your round" we managed to grab these shots of the boards in the beta stages. If their current looks and feature set is anything to go by we can't wait for the public release.

We will start with the one that is slightly more set in its feature set, the MSI 890FXA-GD70.

MSI 890FXA-GD70

The 890 chipset is the latest architecture for the AMD platform. As you can see the scheme of the board follows the lovely MSI colours we saw on the P55-GD85. They look as lovely here as they did there with nothing out of place or random colours.

Dominating the motherboard is the huge DrMOS heatsink and superpipe which is cooling a staggering 16 Phase Power which should provide a smoother delivery than Frank Sinatra dipped in honey.

We have five PCI-E slots and we'd guess that at least three of them should be capable of some x16/x16 or x16/x8/x8 goodness for your graphics card pleasure. With only one PCI-E x1 and one legacy PCI slot it's clear the direction that all motherboards are heading. It's rumoured that this has an 850 Southbridge, and if so we'd be very pleased indeed.

On the bottom right is the OC Dial which enables live overclocking. Want to go faster? Turn that dial. I wonder if it goes up to 11?

Connectivity wise we have two blue USB3 ports run from a NEC chip alongside the standard LAN and eSATA ports.

Speaking of SATA you might believe that we have 6 SATA II and 1 6Gbps vertical SATA. Oh no siree Bob, we have 6 (SIX) SATA 6Gbps ports, and one SATA 3Gbps. Truly a great move by MSI.