The MSI 970 Gaming
The MSI 970 Gaming
Right, here we have the motherboard which can be recognized by that look and feel design wise, a nearly impossible to differentiate layout and a common feature set.
That's a nice looking motherboard alright. The focus of this motherboard is that it has a dark looking design whilst remaining competitive with pricing (sub 100 USD). We dig the two tone (black/red) design a lot, dark colored PCBs are the trend anno 2014. What immediately catches the eye are the sheer stylish looks and heatsinks sitting on top of the chipset. The board has a nice amount of features which we'll walk you through in a minute.
We received the final retail sample and as such it comes packed with a quite decent product bundle. Among the gear inside the kit you'll find the following; the motherboard, a 2-Way SLI Bridge (2 cards at x8 PCIE Gen 2.0), I/O Shield, SATA 6G cables, super-sized case badge, manual and Driver CD.
This is MSI's more affordable Gaming series AMD motherboard but obviously they tried hard to give the motherboard some nice extras. The extras you need to seek are in the overall design and components usage, which is impressive all by itself when you peek at the motherboard for the first time. Notable features include 6x SATA 6G connections, 2x USB 2.0 and 8x 3.0 headers at the rear IO, 2x PCIe x16 slots (physical)Gen 2.0 (these will split to x8 with SLI). Then there are two legacy PCI slots. The mobo has DDR3 2133 MHz support straight out of the BIOS but that requires an OC mode. We spot socket AM3+, and also serious quality capacitors and solid core chokes. MSI applied the military class component design even on this budget board.
Rear IO connectivity then.
- 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
- 1 x optical S/PDIF output
- 8 x USB 2.0
- 2 x USB 3.0
- 1 x Gigabit Ethernet (Killer E2205 Gigabit LAN controller)
- Analog audio
7.1 audio is managed by the Realtek ALC1150 codec which supports High Definition audio up-to 7.1 channels. We'll have a closer look at the audio circuitry on the next pages.
