14 DAY TRIAL // Micro-Star International has been working on one of those motherboards that are part of the reason why people thought Intel and AMD would stop making normal CPUs.
A rumor about the 14nm Broadwell CPU series from Intel, and subsequent speculation, made people think that Intel and AMD would stop making socketed CPUs soon.
AMD assured the world that wasn't going to happen, and so did Intel not too long ago.
Motherboards with integrated CPUs featuring the BGA packaging method (ball grid array) have continued to appear though.
MSI's C847MS-E33 micro-ATX model is one such motherboard, featuring the Celeron 847 BGA processor.
Two DDR3 DIMM memory slots are wired to the CPU socket, allowing for a total of 16 GB of RAM (random access memory).
A PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot is wired to the socket at well. That makes it possible to install any video card, although it won't really make sense for anything too strong to be used.
After all, there isn't much point to a mighty video card when the central processor is a weak, 32nm Sandy Bridge dual-core with 2 MB L2 cache memory and a clock speed of 1.1 GHz. At least the TDP (thermal design power) is low (17W).
The C847MS-E33 motherboard possesses two legacy PCI slots and a PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot in addition to the aforementioned x16 one.
That leaves just the storage and I/O interfaces to cover. The list is made of the common ports and plugs: one SATA 6.0 Gbps port, one SATA 3.0 Gbps connector, Gigabit Ethernet, some USB 2.0/1.1 ports, 6-channel HD audio (optical and coaxial SPDIF) and two video ports (D-Sub and HDMI).
MSI will want a payment of $70-80 in exchange for every C847MS-E33 motherboard sold. Online stores should begin accepting orders soon, if they haven't already.
