14 DAY TRIAL // Not long ago, Micro-Star International said it had prepared a new pair of high-grade gaming hardware components, and now said products are finally available, just in time for the holidays.
The devices we are referring to are the Z87I GAMING AC motherboard and GTX 760 GAMING ITX graphics card.
The mainboard is a mini-ITX platform and the graphics adapter is one whose length does not exceed the width of the motherboard itself.
This is important, because the GeForce GTX 760 isn't exactly the easiest of boards to miniaturize, and it's pretty hard to find good video boards the proper size for mini-ITX platforms.
After all, different retailers and regions have different products, so it might be hard to find things that match, especially on such a narrow market segment.
And by market segment we mean the sector for small form factor gaming computers, the sort used by people who like to participate in LAN parties but really want a desktop instead of a laptop.
The Z87I GAMING AC motherboard features the Z87 chipset (Intel Haswell CPU support), five SATA 6 Gbps ports, three display outputs (HDMI, DisplayPort and dual-link DVI), one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot and six USB 3.0 ports, plus four USB 2.0 connectors.
Gigabyte also tossed in 8-channel Audio Boost technology and a Killer E2205 Ethernet chip (minimizes latency and prioritizes online games when dividing bandwidth), plus Intel Wi-Fi AC with a maximum transfer speed of 867Mbps.
The GTX 760 GAMING ITX, meanwhile, has a black and red cooler (red stripe on black shroud), a RADAX fan, 3-way SLI support, a low noise output (the hybrid design fan helps here) and a thermal output up to 30 °C/F lower than on other video boards.
The base/boost clocks are of 1006 MHz / 1072 MHz and the 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM work at 6008 MHz over a 256-bit interface.
Alas, MSI did not say what prices it wanted for the things. Either of them.