We evaluate two new flagship Z77 motherboards targeting different price points - ASUS's P8Z77-V Premium billed as a feature packed, four-way GPU capable workhorse while MSI opted for a more understated approach with their Z77A-GD80. Both of them feature a debuting Intel 'Cactus Ridge' Thunderbolt controller, which we will cover quite extensively in this piece.
Thanks to one of our forum members we can show you an early picture of an AMD socket FM2 motherboard from MSI. Admittedly the forum post doesn't mention the fact that it's from MSI, but the product model number gives it away.
We've already shown you MSI's unique Super RAID which is present in the new GT70 gaming notebook, but the company has now revealed the remaining specs of both the GT70 and GT60. MSI is as you might've guessed already, kitting out both models with an Ivy Bridge CPU and a GeForce GTX 670M GPU, as well as some other useful and interesting features.
As a prelude to the imminent release of DOTA 2, MSI is teaming up with NVIDIA to bring to you the MSI NVIDIA DotA SEA Championship which will be happening this month. The best teams in the tournament will win up to US$2000 cash and attractive prizes like upcoming MSI N6XX cards. Signup (hurry, less than 1 week left!) or follow the round by round action at http://mgt-dota.msi.com!
Notebooks with an SSD are hardly newsworthy these days, but MSI has managed to pull a fast one and made things interesting once again. The company has put what it calls a Super RAID inside its GT70 gaming notebook and it's unlike anything we've seen to date.
We know many of you have been waiting for quite some time to get your hands on one of the very soon to launch – and already available in some countries – Intel 7-series chipset based motherboards. As such we thought it would be helpful to give a bit of an overview as to the pricing of some of the new boards and compare what you get for your money.
A little more substance has been provided to support the rumour of a $499 (ex. taxes) price tag on NVIDIA's GEFORCE GTX 680 thanks to an early listing on an MSI model by European retailer PC Components.
Equipped with their brand new Twin Frozr IV cooling system and various other overclocking-oriented components, is the MSI R7970 Lightning the best graphics card that money can buy?
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MSI certainly wasn't kidding anyone with all the marketing hype it ran with to put its Radeon R7970 Lightning graphics card up on a pedestal, as Swedish overclocking pro Elmor demonstrated when pairing up this lovely highly non-reference HD 7970 with liquid nitrogen cooling measures.
Back at CES the first pictures of MSI's Z77A-GD80 motherboard made an appearance, a board that was said to feature Thunderbolt connectivity, but back then MSI hadn't actually implemented it. Fast forward three months and the company is now showing off the final board with the actual hardware fitted to the board.
With CeBIT getting underway in Germany, manufacturers are taking the wraps off of their Z77 motherboards. MSI are preparing to release their boards, one of which is the Z77A-GD65 which we are going to preview today.
MSI has dared to do what no other notebook manufacturer would by selling a gaming laptop with a heavily overclocked mobile Core i7 EE processor tipping beyond the 4GHz barrier. This will be as part of a limited edition variant of its GT780DX, running a Core i7-2920XM Extreme Edition with frequencies of up to 4.16GHz on tap in Turbo Boost mode (up from the stock 3.5GHz Turbo Boost frequency).
Since the official launch of the Radeon 7970/7950 series last month, prices have dropped from their inflated levels and actual stock availability have improved (at least here in Singapore stores). With Nvidia's Kepler based cards not ready anytime soon (or else we'll have them in our pants already), AMD's 28nm Tahiti GPUs remains on the shopping lists of gamers and overclockers alike for the forseeable future. Today we review MSI's custom cooled Radeon 7950 (dubbed Twin Frozr III) to see how it fairs against the rest.
Today we take a look at MSI's flagship X79 motherboard. This feature packed overclocking board is aimed at anyone who wants something extreme. A 22 phase VRM coupled with quad SLI capability and every OC feature from direct OC buttons to manual PCI-E switches this board packs a strong punch, but does it live up to all the hype?
Our Chinese language site got a look at a couple of MSI Z77 motherboards back at CES, although early revisions and now pictures of what appears to be close to a final revision of a yet unseen Z77 motherboard has appeared online. The model in question is the Z77A-GD55, a slightly more basic model than what we've seen so far, albeit a reasonably feature rich board nonetheless.
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