MSI
MSI continues to have a strong showing at Computex with multiple booth locations and plenty to show off in both areas. I already covered their upcoming notebook solutions in my first Computex article, but let’s see what they have for motherboards and GPUs.
This is the K9N Diamond that features the 590 SLI chipset for the AMD platform and a Creative Audigy SE 7.1 channel integrated audio. That alone could make it the best 590 board on the market.
Also for the AM2 platform, MSI has the K9A Platinum board that uses the ATI Radeon XPress 3200 chipset for full X16 CrossFire support.
MSI will also have a 975X based board called the 975X Platinum for use with Conroe. It has Dolby Master Studio certification but still uses an Intel HD 7.1 channel Audio solution.
MSI’s P965 Platinum uses the Intel 965 chipset and will have support for the Core 2 Duo processor; this board uses a standard HD audio codec instead of a Creative-based chip.
The last board I’ll show here is the MSI PT890 Neo-V that uses the VIA Pt890 chipset and supports the upcoming Conroe CPUs — this was one of the few VIA chipset boards I found on the show floor this year.
MSI had some interesting graphics cards on display, like this one with HDMI support.
Based on the 7600 GT GPU, this card has a dual-link capable DVI output, HDMI output and standard TV output connector.
This card is based on the X1600 Pro GPU and also supports HDMI output.
This card is only using the X1600XT GPU, but it has one of the most interesting cooling schemes I have seen: peltier cooling.
You can see the peltier setup here in more detail — hopefully we’ll see this cooling method reach other GPUs.
Finally, MSI was showing the first upgradeable graphics card, the Geminium GO. It uses an MXM connection to attach to the PCB on the card, giving users lower power consumption and lower temperatures in the process. Also, since there are MXM slots on both the front, and the back of the card, you can support SLI as well!
We’ll see if that kind of innovation ever reaches the retail market.
