Linus Tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by nc.com your source for
great technology selection and service along with Corsair memory and Western
Digital we're here in the MSI suite at CES 2014 and they've got some pretty
exciting stuff on display starting oh that's heavy with the R9 290x lightning
now unlike the GTX 780 lightning which we actually checked out not that long
ago there is no GPU reactor on the back however not to worry guys because even
though GTX 780 lightning had a GPU
reactor which in theory provides more power to the GPU NVIDIA has a power
limit that's sort of a a pesky uh overclocking limiter so to speak AMD has
imposed no such limitation on MSI so you will be able to use their triple over
voltage features as well as this incredibly beefy I mean two and a half
slot looking cooler to unlock the full potential of the R9 290x GPU so so it's
got the usual features you've got a full black back plate as well as a unisync
and then of course the massive heat pipe cooler that has four heat pipes running
all the way through it looks like it's actually got five there's one going the other way it also has a uh try frozer
cooler so unlike the more traditional twin frozer cooler you can not only have
more fans you can also control them independently so the two outer ones are
on one pwm control and the middle one is actually on a separate one now in line
with the uh the hint before about how much power you can feed this thing it
has two 8 Pin PCI Express power inputs
and one PCI Express six pin power input
so I'm pretty excited to see what we can do with that particular card when we get
our hands on it on the other side of the spectrum we've got the GTX 760 ITX so it
has a single 8 Pin power connector and it is only a little bit longer about an
inch and and change longer than the length of a standard PCI Express slot
this goes along with a bit of a a focus that MSI has here on ITX design so in
the past we only really saw um we I mean we've seen their d87 ITX gaming branded
motherboard but only on the Intel side well now we're getting an AMD
performance optimized ITX board too this is on the fm2 uh plus platform it's
going to be compatible with AMD's upcoming cavar CPU it all has PCI
Express 16x it's got Intel uh Wi-Fi it's
got all the kind of features that you want black PCB all that kind of stuff so
you can now finally build a truly performance grade AMD ITX system
something we haven't really been able to do up until now speaking of other AMD
designs they now have gaming boards for AMD both in an ATX flavor and an matx
flavor just as a reminder all MSI's gaming branded boards use their military
class concept so that is high quality components they also feature audio boost
which is a headphone amped uh audio output and they also use killer onboard
networking in order to give give you guys that prioritization feature that
enables your games to have the highest priority out of all of your network
traffic of course they come with the usual MSI gaming color scheme which is a
black and red with a matte PCB look that
uh will definitely turn some heads the last one here we've got is a completely
unreleased product this isn't even finished yet in fact it doesn't even
seem to have a name it's just am1 and
then on the back there's FS1 I whatever all of these things mean this is an AMD
kabini board so that's not a proper desktop platform hold on a second what's
going on well kabini actually has some pretty interesting advantages over some
of the other processors available one is that it could be powerful enough for a
relatively low usage desktop number two is it's available in up to an X6
configuration and number three is the onboard Graphics aren't that bad so
especially when you factor in the way that AMD is pushing forward on open C
and compute to increase the performance of overall platform without focusing
that much on CPU power the fact that you're are going to be able to have a
socketed upgradeable kabini board and an ITX form factor could be very
interesting to folks who are looking for something power efficient that's
powerful enough to do basic stuff like say for example play some Super Meat Boy
but not necessarily powerful enough for the most you know demanding games but
could handle something like game streaming on Steam OS where's Linus
going with this I think I just said it don't miss any of our CES 2014 coverage
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