MSI is a new sponsor here at ThinkComputers and they were nice enough to invite us up to their suite at Aria to check out some of their latest products. They showed us their new Twin Frozr III cooling system for video cards, new Mini-ITX boards that feature both AMD Fusion and Intel P67, and a new motherboard that is just insane! Let check out what they have in store for 2011!
Motherboards
The motherboard that really caught our eye was the Big Bang Marshall. Why did it catch our eye? Let’s see how about the 8 PCI-E x16 slots! Pretty crazy setup right? MSI has really pulled out all the stops with this motherboard. MSI has used a bridge chip from Lucid Hydra since P67 by default only supports 8x times 2 by default. So when you have 4 cards installed you will get full x16 support and when you have all 8 slots in use they will default to x8. Each PCI-E lane can be disabled / enabled with a flip of a switch. The Big Bang Marshall also features the Triple BIOS feature. This is great for overclockers, because it means you can basically have all of your overclocking settings in one BIOS and still have an optimized BIOS and fail-safe BIOS. MSI tells us this board will be available in early February for around $300-350.
The other board that really caught our eye was the Big Bang Conqueror. If you look at the photo below you can see that this is an AMD board. We were not given any information on the board, but from what we can see this is a look into the future of what we can expect to see from AMD. The board supports AM3+ processors, has 6x SATA 6GB/s ports and the board is already in revision 2.0. I’m sure you can guess what chipset this might be from AMD, but we can only speculate.
Video Cards
MSI is introducing their Twin Frozr III cooling system to new video cards in their Hawk and Lightning lines. This new cooling system features a large heatpipe design and 2 cooling fans. This of course is going to replace their Twin Forzr II cooling system we saw on their older cards.
MSI’s Military Class II is a big selling point for their motherboards. Now MSI video cards offer the same features like the SFC (Super Ferrite Choke) choke setup. MSI says this design provides 30% better efficiency than standard chokes. Part of MSI’s Military Class II components also includes Hi-c CAP’s (Highly-conductive polymerized capacitor) which provide an 8x longer lifetime than traditional Solid CAP. Finally the Solid CAP design which has a claimed lifetime of 10 years.
Mini-ITX Boards
The first AMD Fusion or Brazos board from MSI is going to be the E350IA-E45. This board is of course powered by the AMD Fusion E-350 dual-core processor. It also features DDR3 memory support, SATA 6GB/s, USB 3.0 and HD audio.
The other Mini-ITX board that MSI had on display was a P67 Sandy Bridge board. This board was a bit limited on connections, but does feature DDR3 memory support and HDMI out.
