MSI Has Five AMD X470 Motherboards
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Not to be excluded from the AMD X470 paper launch party, MSI announced that it too will be offering a new lineup of motherboards, revealing five different models.
The new MSI boards will support the upcoming 2nd-generation AMD Ryzen 2000-series processors, and MSI provided full specifications for four of the five new products. The MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon, Pro Carbon AC, and M7 AC all feature dual 8-pin CPU power connectors, but the Gaming Plus features a single 8-pin and a 4-pin connector. All four of the detailed boards sport dual M.2, four DDR4 DIMM slots, and three PCIe x16 slots, and they all come in an ATX form factor. Whereas the Carbon (both of them) and M7 motherboards support 3-way Crossfire and 2-way SLI graphics configurations, the Gaming Plus supports only 2-and 3-way Crossfire setups.
The MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC stands out as the enthusiast board in the bunch, with a slightly higher supported DDR4 memory frequency of 3,600MHz (the other three boards support up to 3,466MHz) and M.2 shielding called "Frozr" that covers both of the M.2 slots and connects to the PCH heatsink. The Pro Carbon boards have a singular M.2 shield, but the budget-oriented Gaming Plus doesn't offer one. However, the Pro Carbon motherboards are also the only boards that support RAID 0, 1, and 10 for both SATA and NVMe storage devices (the other motherboards only support SATA RAID configurations).
Although the M7 supports A-Series Athlon processors (with onboard graphics), there aren't any display outputs on the motherboard (the others offer at least two interfaces), and it's clearly aimed at enthusiasts who are going to use a discrete graphics card over integrated graphics. The X470 Gaming Pro Carbon and Pro Carbon AC are nearly identical (same SATA, M.2, PCIe, and USB connectivity), but the AC version sports an Intel Wireless-AC 3168 802.11ac WiFi module.
All of the boards also feature MSI's Mystic Light RGB LED control software and the company's hardware optimization utilities, Core Boost, DDR4 Boost, and X-Boost (for USB and storage).
MSI also listed an X470 Gaming Pro motherboard in its press release, but a spec page has yet to turn up for the fifth member of MSI's X470 motherboard band. Pricing and availability for the detailed boards also remains unknown for the time being.
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Derek Forrest was a contributing freelance writer for Tom's Hardware. He covered hardware news and reviews, focusing on gaming desktops and laptops.
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barryv88 Kind of double standards going on from MSI, Gigabyte and Asus, offering AMD boards galore, calling them "Gaming" this and "Pro" that. But on the GPU front, they've shifted AMD GPU's aside with their exclusive GPP partnering. Yea, you don't have me fooled as I won't be buying their boards either. Been very happy with Asrock for the past 8 years, and so it shall stay :)Reply -
vitalblast Disappointed that MSI is not offering a U.2 slot with any of their new boards. I was initially going to get the MSI titanium because it had the U.2 slot but since I waited I figured I would go ahead and get one of the newer versions. Its bad enough their VRM did not perform as well as Gigabyte and Asus. Without this I am forced to go with another brand. I really want u.2 to become a commercial standard.Reply -
cryoburner Reply
U.2 is still quite uncommon, and is still more for servers. Considering that there are no consumer-oriented drives making use of U.2, it doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense to put it on a motherboard in place of something that people might actually have need for. You can also convert an M.2 or PCIe slot to U.2 with an adapter, so it's not like you won't ever be able to install a U.2 drive should the connection become popular in the future. It's also possible that the connection might never become popular though, in which case they would have put something on the board that practically no one would have ever had any use for.20889171 said:Without this I am forced to go with another brand. I really want u.2 to become a commercial standard. -
bit_user I'm disappointed by the lack of ECC support I'm seeing in AM4 boards. So far, the only X470 boards I've seen to advertise it are from ASRock, and they state it's only supported on Ryzen Pro processors.Reply
I can't understand why the latter point, when AMD publicly stated that ECC support will not be limited on any of their Ryzens (meaning it should work on vanilla and Pro Ryzens, alike).
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bit_user X470 boards claiming to support ECC memory (in ECC mode):Reply
https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/X470-GAMING-PLUS/Specification
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/X470-AORUS-GAMING-7-WIFI-rev-10#sp
ASRock has several, but they require Ryzen Pro CPUs for ECC mode.
None from ASUS, AFAIK.