14 DAY TRIAL // Micro-Star International made it a point of proving that it doesn't take an all-new motherboard to provide Intel's new Ivy Bridge CPUs with a home.
The company has already made its share of product releases involving the third-generation Core central processing units, not the least of which is the allegedly fastest Ivy Bridge laptop in the world.
Now, MSI has returned to the root of the problem, so to speak: motherboards.
In addition to the 7-Series motherboards, there are G3 series boards that support Ivy Bridge now too.
In fact, pretty much all G3-series platforms can gain support for the newcomers, as well as the technologies meant to go with them, through a BIOS update process.
As one may find out by going here, the list is pretty extensive, composed of MSI H61 (G3) and MSI Z68 (G3) models.
Once the BIOS has been upgraded, the maximum achievable speed of random access memory will be 2,400 MHz (DDR3).
Similarly, the Intel Rapid Start and Intel Smart Connect technologies will be supported as well, even though they are supposed to be exclusive to 7-series chipsets. Owners should be able to use new 22nm Xeon CPUs too, not just Core i5 and Core i7.
“By downloading the update software package from MSI’s official web site, MSI Z68 (G3) mainboards could receive the latest BIOS and driver upgrade (ME7 to ME8) for guaranteed next-gen support with no additional cost,” the company wrote.
For the more technically-minded, MSI's new BIOS includes the Preboot eXecution Environment(PXE), which uses a network interface to boot the system, allowing for the creation of a primary partition and installing an OS (the top capacity for the partition is 2.2 TB).
For those who want to know more about the CPUs, or what alternatives they have when searching for a motherboard, they can go here and pick what interests them most.