Well MSI is the first at this, but I think we could see many motherboard manufactures doing this, they have prepared special SKUs of their motherboards that include Intel Optane Cache SSDs. These motherboards will have a slight price increase over the normal price of the boards, but the total price will be cheaper than buying the motherboard and Optane Cache SSDs separately.
The two motherboards MSI will be offering the Optane Cache SSDs on will be the B250M Bazooka and the Z270 Tomahawk. MSI is just added “Opt Boost” to the end of each product name. Both boards will come with 16GB Intel Optane memory pre-installed and configured in the boards M.2 slots.
Intel’s 16GB Optane Memory offers burst speeds 14x those or regular (mechanical) hard drives. The latest Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver configured for Optane will juggle your most frequently accessed data in and out of the drive from your main storage device, which will boost performance.
