14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may have managed to dominate the high-end CPU industry, but that doesn't mean that AMD doesn't have some powerful chips. It does, even though they don't match Intel's beasts performance-wise, and MSI has acknowledged that.
You might not know it, but it's become rather difficult to differentiate between high-end motherboards, since all makers of mainboards know how to maximize the capabilities of their platforms.
It's not that different from pretty much every other field of the IT industry really. It's just a bit more troublesome, ironically enough.
You'd think that it wouldn't be so hard to add some perks to a mainboard when there's no price limit to worry about, but the sad fact is that everyone else is likely to do the same.
Case in point, the things that MSI says make its new 870 Gaming motherboard stand out are the Killer LAN networking technology and the Audio Boost 2 powered by Creative Sound Blaster Cinema2.
In truth, the fact that the platform is powered by AMD technology instead of Intel is a much more obvious departure from the norm.
MSI has stuck to Intel Core-series chip support so far, but it has seemingly decided that the AM3+ Bulldozer CPU socket could use some attention on its part.
USB Audio Power is another asset that the company made sure to mention in its press release. Headsets and external audio DACs connected via USB will be able to run off 5V power even when the PC is turned off.
Of course, you'll be better off using the system's audio technology whenever possible, since the Creative Sound Blaster Cinema2-powered Audio Boost 2 tech comes with Multi-Channel Speaker Calibration and headphone profiles, plus EMI shielding.
Furthermore, MSI included its well-known Military Class 4 components, with Hi-C CAPs, Solid CAPs, Dark CAPs, SFC and Dark Chokes. Add to that ECO power features (you can physically cut the power to unused chips to save up to 29% power usage) and all bases are covered.
Finally, the MSI 970 Gaming motherboard boasts Click BIOS 4 and OC Genie 4 technology, for automatic overclocking of the whole PC. It will be good to enable a few years down the line, when age starts to catch up with your system.
As for the core specs, we're looking at four DDR3 DIMM memory slots (DDR3-2133), two PCI Express x16 slots, two PCI Express x1 slots, two legacy PCI slots, six SATA III ports, a bunch of USB connectors (both 3.0 and 2.0) and the normal I/O. Sadly, MSI did not share the price of the new platform.
Updated June 20, 2014: Fixed the CPU/APU misnomer when referring to the AM3+ socket.