14 DAY TRIAL // MSI may have already made the formal announcement of the 890FXA-GD70, but, as all hardware makers do, the company already has plans to make available another motherboard, meant for those that cannot afford this high-end model. While it is also meant as a platform for six-core processors, the upcoming 870A-G54, as its name implies, uses a lower end chipset, but can still handle the workload brought by Thuban CPUs and the SATA 6.0Gbps interface.
The 870A-G54 is based on a combination of the AMD 870 northbridge and the SB850 southbridge. Overall, the mainboard is a less feature-packed ATX motherboard, but it still manages to pack four DDR3-1600 memory slots, a pair of PCI Express x16 slots (for dual-GPU graphical configurations) and no less than six SATA 6.0Gbps ports. There is also built-in 7.1 channel audio and a pair of USB 3.0 connectors, to make sure that high-speed transfer rates are available not just to internal but also to external storage devices.
As expected, MSI did its best to implement as many of its special design options and technologies as it could. What it succeeded in doing was provide the OC Genie overclocking function and core-unlocking capabilities, which will allow AMD multi-core chips to turn from dual-core and triple-core into quad-core, and from quad-core to six-core (as long as they have disabled cores). MSI also designed its platform with the now-well-known set of Military Class components Hi-c CAPs, Solid CAPs, and Icy Chokes. These increase system stability and reliability.
Basically, the motherboard will support any socket AM3 central processing unit, as well as matching memory, storage and graphics capabilities. Unfortunately, the price of this particular product is just as unknown as that of the 890FXA-GD70. Still, it should not remain so for long, considering that it should reach stores fairly soon.