MSI 970 Gaming motherboard review

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AMD 970 Chipset

The AMD 970 Chipset

To understand the series 9 chipset from AMD all we simply need to do is tell you a thing or two about its features. The chipset consists of two chips that are added onto the motherboard PCB. The Northbridge chip, which is called the 990FX/990X/980/970 and the paired (Southbridge chip) SB950. Together they form the infrastructure for all standard devices, connectivity and interconnect bandwidth. The Northbridge chip primarily functions as a control HUB for your processor, memory and PCIe links towards your graphics chipset. It is the primary chip responsible for these functions, the FX (opposed to GX) extension however indicates that there is no IGP embedded into this ASIC which the GX versions do have.

Where the 990FX has many PCIe links available for your dedicated graphics (or other add-in cards), the 970 will have less. The 970 chipset allows you to utilize two full x16 graphics cards, or even four graphics cards as they would run at x8 PCIe links on ther 990. In theory these would be your possible PCIe lane configurations: 2x16 or 4x8 PCIe x16 and 6x1,1x4.

AMD FX 8150 processor review

As stated, this chipset also includes native support for SATA 6Gb/s for aggressive RAID and SSD configurations and all motherboards now have USB 3.0 support thanks to a discrete USB 3.0 solution, but it's not embedded into the chipset. The 890 FX chipset already had it and 990FX will also get IOMMU support. Not something that the majority of you guys would be interested in but it allows for virtual addressing of memory by system devices. This enables devices to use their native drivers in a virtualized environment for enhanced performance. In a non-virtualized environment, IOMMU provides memory isolation and protection capabilities - device access to system memory is vetted by the IOMMU such that critical/unrelated memory information (e.g. kernel pages, protected content) can be protected, leading overall to a more robust system. With an updated Hyperlink revision 3.1 data path we can now connect to the SB950 chip which mainly handles system IO.


The SB950 Southbridge

The SB950 Southbridge is a merely a small update over the older SB7x0 and SB8x0 series. The Southbridge ASIC is always used for peripheral connectivity like your HDDs, audio, USB, PATA and so on. We see support for up-to six SATA 6G (SATA3) devices; 6G SATA connectors will increase the bandwidth on the SATA controller from 3 to 6 GBit/sec. Now for regular HDDs that is not really very important. But with the tremendous rise of fast SSD drives this really is a large plus.

Typically we get 3000 Mbit/s : 8 = 375 MB/sec bandwidth minus tolerances and random occurrences. SATA3 is doubling it up, as such we get 6000 Mbit/sec : 8 = 750 MB/sec of available bandwidth for your storage devices. As you can understand, with SSDs getting faster and faster that's just a much wanted and welcomed increase of bandwidth. You do need a SATA 6G HDD/SSD to be able to take advantage of that extra bandwidth of course. RAID performance can see massive benefits of the updated SATA interface. For SB950, RAID modes 0,1,5 and 10 are supported.
 

 

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SB950 will allow you to connect up-to 14 USB 2.0 devices, comes with support for SATA3 and 8 channel HD Audio, the old fashioned PCI interface, and also included is native 1000/100/10 Mbit/s Ethernet. So what has changed in the chipset over 890 FX you might ask? Well, pretty frickin little to be honest, we did spot 4 PCIe links. The main chipset has new processor and socket support, RAID functionality has improved a bit and the PCIe data-paths and USB 3.0 paths have been optimized. Nothing new here really.

Dual channel system memory

Supported processors support a DDR3 clock frequency of 1866 MHz, this will help out with memory bandwidth. That doesn't mean you have to throw away your slower DDR3 memory, slower memory is obviously supported. We actually expect the most of you guys to use DDR3 1600, which is absolutely a sweetspot price/performance wise in 2014. As you'll notice in the benchmarks, overall memory bandwidth has increased quite a bit, though albeit still 'only' dual-channel.
 

Socket AM3+

The FX series processors is be based on Socket AM3+, the 900 series chipset based motherboards will obviously be 100% compatible. But that doesn't meant that certain series 800 motherboards won't work with the 2nd generation FX processors. Several motherboard manufacturers have already announced mainboard compatibility with "future" AM3+ multi-core processors. Please check with your motherboard manufacturer and see if your AMD 800 series mainboard with AM3+ CPU is supported (BIOS update), then you could enjoy the benefits of the new 32nm processors with 2nd generation Turbo Core technology as well.

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