6 New Boards On The Horizon From MSI for Intel’s 5th Gen Chipset

Flagship Gaming 9 AC & Mini-ITX Gaming

MSI Gaming 9 AC

As the top board that MSI will have to offer at launch, the Gaming 9 AC will be kitted out with the full works of what MSI will have to offer and when we look down the feature list, it’s easy to see why this is their class leading board intended to take on every high level board that will be out on the market at launch.

Like all of the boards, the Gaming 9 AC has an all-new design – from the PCB right up to the heatsinks and colour choice, and like every board that we will see launched, it will support the current 4th Generation Haswell chips along with Haswell Refresh, Haswell Refresh K Series (Devil’s Canyon) and Broadwell K-Series which will be out next year. In a way the 5th Gen chipset will be like Z77, where it is able to support more than one generation of processors.

In addition to the above this board will also see:

• 12 phase power design through an 8-pin PCIe power header
• Military Class IV Components with upgraded heatsinks
• Support for upto 64GB 2666MHz DDR3 (O.C.+)
• V-Check Points 2
• Power, reset & OC controls next to DIMM Slots
• 3 x PCIe 3.0 x16, 3 PCIe 3.0 x1
• M.2 PCIe slot for next generation mSATA SSDs
• 8x SATA 6GB/s ports
• 1x USB3.0 header
• Audio Boost 2 with Xtreme Audio DAC
• Killer NIC E2200 with 802.11ac wireless

MSI m-ITX Gaming

Mini ITX boards have been getting more and more popular over the last couple of years and as a result we find only one board in the lineup not running to full ATX specifications.

Whilst still playing host to the same 5th Gen chipset, the m-ITX board will feature:

• 6 Phase power through an 8-pin PCIe header
• A Single PCIe3.0 x16 slot
• Two DIMM slots for upto 32GB 2666MHz DDR3 (O.C.+)
• Four SATA 6GB/S ports
• Native USB3.0 header
• Audio Boost 2.0
• 6x USB3.0 ports
• 2x USB2.0
• 2x eSATA
• 2x HDMI
• 1x DisplayPort
• Killer NIC E2200 LAN & 802.11ac wireless