The MSI Gaming Series of motherboards and graphics cards have gone from strength to strength recently, they’re a popular choice with system builders and end users alike for their high-end performance, build quality and overall design. This means that news of three brand new motherboards is very good news indeed.
With Haswell’s refresh on the horizon, we’ve been hearing about a lot of motherboard manufacturers working on new motherboards, features and more that will work alongside the socket LGA1150 lineups that we will see throughout 2014.
The Intel Z97 Express chipset will be the focus for the new MSI motherboards, starting with the mid-range Z97 Gaming 3, then the premium Z97 Gaming 5 and finally the high-end Z97 Gaming 7. This obviously means MSI have dropped their old product naming format in favour of the newer and much simpler ones, so gone are the G45, GD55 and GD65 monikers.
The new boards will be packed full of features such as M.2 slots, SATA-Express with 10Gbps bandwidth for drives. The Gaming 7 features a 12-phase CPU iVR, 3 x PCI-E 3.0 x16, 4 x PCIe x1, 8 SATA 6 GB/s ports, an M2 slot and a whole lot more. The Gaming 5 is based around the same hardware, but with a few fewer features and finally the Gaming 3 is based around a lighter PCB with a 6-phase CPU iVR, no M.2 slot and legacy PCI slots. The bonus here however is that the Gaming 3 still retains the ground-layer isolated on-board audio and Killer NIC of its two bigger brothers.
Excited about Z97 yet? I know I am!
Thank you TechPowerUp for providing us with this information.
