MSI Ready with 890FXA-GD70 Motherboard

[btarunr]

MSI seems to have finalized design of its first motherboard based on the AMD 890FX chipset, the 890FXA-GD70. A possible prototype of this, then called the 890FX-GD70, was pictured back in early December, 2009. The 890FXA-GD70 has five PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots in all. Their electrical configuration, when all are populated, could be x8, x8, x8, x8, 1.1 x4, or x16, NC, x16, NC, 1.1 x4, supporting ATI CrossFireX. A PCI-E x1 and PCI make for the other two expansion slots. A large rectangular heatsink cools both the AMD 890FX chipset, and the 8-phase VRM, while a heat pipe connects this to the heatsink over the SB850 southbridge chip. The CPU is connected to four DDR3 memory slots with one-sided retention clips that don't come in the way of graphics cards in the first slot.

The SB850 gives out six SATA 6 Gb/s ports with RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, 10, JBOD support, while a JMicron made controller gives out an additional SATA 3 Gb/s port, an IDE connector, and possibly an eSATA connector. Connectivity options include 8+2 channel HD audio with optical and coaxial SPDIF connections, two gigabit Ethernet interfaces, two USB 3.0 ports (and a number of USB 2.0 ports), FireWire, and eSATA. This motherboard is ready for upcoming Phenom II X6 and Phenom II X4 processors, apart from existing processors in the AM3 package. It should be released in time for the six-core chips, late April.



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[Zubasa]

Do Want
On the other hand, MSI often puzzles me with their slot layout.

 

[fochkoph]

Nice to see MSI adapted one sided retention clips for the memory. I'm so ready for 890FX, my P45 is growing long in the tooth.

 

[Polarman]

5 PCIe ? Why? 3 is already overkill.

I want to see the 890GX Platinum instead.

 

[WarEagleAU]

I was wondering if they were going with the 5th for maybe Physx? On the DEC announcement, they had 6 PCE 16x slots

 

[nt300]

Are people forgetting you can use thy PCIe x16 slots for anything that is a hardware based (Like SATA controller, sound card etc) PCIe x1, x4, x8 and x16 not just for video cards. So 5 PCIe x16 is good, 6 is better and 7 is best.