Finals Words and conclusion
Final words and conclusion
MSI did a good job with the 970 Gaming. For 90 bucks it offers decent enough features and then some extras like the Killer Gigabit jack, special care for the audio solution but most of all the aesthetics look really good. You get a nice matte black PCB with dark colored components, then a hint of red is used to make it a gaming series motherboard. It is a good looking product alright. The 970 chipset however does not come with PCIE Gen 3.0 support, but for graphics you will still have a single x16 or two 8 PCIe Gen 2.0 links available, truth is that it's even plenty enough bandwidth for two AMD R9 290X or Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards. That is the sheer reality. It must be noted though that most of you will not opt for a dual-GPU solution anyway as AMD's high-end processors will bottleneck games with extremely fast framerates a bit. For GPU stringent titles however that dynamic changes. AMD has set the strategy to pursue processors with as many CPU cores as possible. The benefit here is that massively threaded applications really like that very much. Look at the Handbrake (multi-threaded video transcoding application) results and content creation with MAXON's animation software CINEMA 4D. But yeah, the hardware needs the software in order to shine. Times are slowly changing though, I mean we had the single core to dual-core revolution, quickly followed by four, six and thus now eight cores. So where multi-threaded applications are programmed right AMD really starts to shine with the FX series. I've been using this motherboard and the the FX 8370E processor for a couple of days now though and granted the overall experience with this processor is great. The OS responds more than fast enough and for your everyday usage you'll have a hard time noticing any difference to say a Core i5 processor. Once you start up applications that allow for it, multi-threading kicks in really nicely, performance will quickly see high-end grade performance. We do recommend Windows 8.1 with many CPU cores BTW.
Gaming
In games we see similar behaviour but the AMD processors remain relatively weak in games due to their average per-core performance. But if you take, for example, one Radeon R9 290, then it would be in good symbiosis with the processor performance. Overall, in the higher resolutions you'll be GPU dependant more than CPU dependant. So gaming at Full HD with the MSI 970 Gaming and say an AMD FX 8370 series processor will not be a problem. Once you go Crossfire / SLI or use a high-end dedicated graphics card, that's where you would like to have a faster per-core performing product. But for mainstream gaming and usage the processor with the 970 series motherboard will be absolutely fine.
Video encoding and Decoding
For the ones that use their PC for content creation and video transcoding, well this processor kicks in very nicely, and for a reasonable price you get impressive multi-threaded performance. Considering that an FX 83xx series processor will cost merely 150~199 USD we can state that these processors offers great value, under the condition that you use multi-threaded encoders. Video playback is not an issue, the per-core performance is fast enough to deal with any Blu-ray or 1080P content stream.
Is there any stuff missing? Well for the money the feature-set is good, but sure we could mentioned Wireless Internet 802.11ac, M.2. PCIe Express SSD interface, OC and power/reset buttons and a Diagnostic LED. But this is nitpicking a bit I guess.
Final Words
As stated in the first paragraph, MSI has a truly lovely offering with the MSI 970 Gaming. Here is a tip, if you want value for money then bypass the processor we used today. Pick up the AMD FX-8320 Black Edition. It's the cheaper 8-core processor for only 120 EURO. Overclock it to say 4 GHz and boom, you got enough performance. Pair it with this motherboard (90 EURO) and for just over 200 EURO you already have the core infrastructure of your PC, and 8 CPU cores I must add. Your system will be fast and responsive. And yes, an Achilles heel simply remains single threaded applications. The bigger problem here is that it effects game performance quite a bit, especially with high-end dedicated graphics cards and that's why, in it's current form, the FX series simply is not that popular among the gaming community. Good for AMD that Mantle popularity seems to be growing, this will greatly help AMD get freed from CPU bottleneck performance issues. The MSI 970 Gaming combo with an 8-core FX processor of your choice we can recommend in the mid-range PC gaming and desktop space. The FX 8320 we just suggested with eight CPU cores is hip in a PC desktop environment with the many threads you can fire off at it, and if you love to compress, transcode or use your PC as a workstation then it will bring heaps of performance and fantastic value. You can easily tweak that 8350 to the performance levels shown today with this motherboard. At a price of 90 USD the MSI 970 Gaming is a bit of a steal really, a steal or even soft-spot that will get you pretty fun 8-core mainstream computing with a decent gaming experience and some very nice features. Definitely recommended as it is a nice value motherboard, with fantastic looks ...he kept repeating :)
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