14 DAY TRIAL // Since Intel has revealed its collection of new central processing units, at last, motherboards ready to welcome them have started to crop up as well, all set to start shipping the moment the CPUs themselves do. What we'll be looking at here is the MSI 9-Series Gaming line.
For those that aren't totally up to speed with recent developments, Intel has recently launched the Haswell fourth generation of central processing units.
Although “launched” isn't totally accurate, since the chips won't make it to stores before the middle of next month (May 2014) or so.
Nevertheless, the company introduced the collection, composed of 44 CPUs in total, 17 of which are for laptops and 27 for desktops.
The desktop collection is the one that MSI was looking at when it made the 9-series Gaming 9 AC, 9-series Gaming 7, and 9-series Gaming 3 motherboards, plus the mini-ITX 9-series Gaming ITX.
All of them will be released at the same time as the processors, or maybe a bit earlier, though not by much. As we said before, look towards mid-May.
The 9-series Gaming 9 ITX, as the smallest of the lot, will be the cheapest too, not that we know the price. None of the prices were disclosed in fact.
Anyway, the mainboard has a 6-phase VRM (voltage regulation module), a single PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot, 802.11 ac networking (Wi-Fi), AudioBoost technology, and Killer E2200 NIC LAN, plus two DDR3 memory slots.
The 9-series Gaming 3 is the “weakest” of the high-end, full-ATX boards, with 6-phase CPU VRM, one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot, a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (electrical x4) slot, two PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots, three PCI slots and Killer E2200 NIC LAN. It also has six SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, for storage, and four memory slots.
9-series Gaming 7 has a 12-phase VRM, three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, four PCI-Express 2.0 x1, eight SATA 6 Gbps ports, and 802.11 ac WLAN, plus four memory slots.
Finally, the 9-series Gaming 9 AC has a 12-phase VRM, four DDR3 memory slots, three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (configurable in x16/NC/NC or x8/x8/NC or x8/x4/x4), a PCI Express x2 M.2 slot (for SSDs), Killer E2200 NIC, 802.11 ac WLAN Wi-Fi, and eight SATA 6.0 Gbps ports.
All four motherboards bear the black and red color scheme that has become common for Gaming-series hardware from Micro-Star International. It's a real shame that prices aren't known, although maybe it's for the best, since they're bound to be high enough to leave at least some people faint of heart.
