R9 290X Lightning, 760 ITX & Gaming Grade AMD Kaveri Motherboards - MSI Suite CES 2014
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
916 words · ~4 min read
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Linus Tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by nc.com your source for
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great technology selection and service along with Corsair memory and Western
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Digital we're here in the MSI suite at CES 2014 and they've got some pretty
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exciting stuff on display starting oh that's heavy with the R9 290x lightning
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now unlike the GTX 780 lightning which we actually checked out not that long
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ago there is no GPU reactor on the back however not to worry guys because even
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though GTX 780 lightning had a GPU
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reactor which in theory provides more power to the GPU NVIDIA has a power
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limit that's sort of a a pesky uh overclocking limiter so to speak AMD has
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imposed no such limitation on MSI so you will be able to use their triple over
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voltage features as well as this incredibly beefy I mean two and a half
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slot looking cooler to unlock the full potential of the R9 290x GPU so so it's
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got the usual features you've got a full black back plate as well as a unisync
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and then of course the massive heat pipe cooler that has four heat pipes running
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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
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cooler so unlike the more traditional twin frozer cooler you can not only have
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more fans you can also control them independently so the two outer ones are
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on one pwm control and the middle one is actually on a separate one now in line
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with the uh the hint before about how much power you can feed this thing it
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has two 8 Pin PCI Express power inputs
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and one PCI Express six pin power input
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so I'm pretty excited to see what we can do with that particular card when we get
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our hands on it on the other side of the spectrum we've got the GTX 760 ITX so it
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has a single 8 Pin power connector and it is only a little bit longer about an
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inch and and change longer than the length of a standard PCI Express slot
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this goes along with a bit of a a focus that MSI has here on ITX design so in
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the past we only really saw um we I mean we've seen their d87 ITX gaming branded
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motherboard but only on the Intel side well now we're getting an AMD
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performance optimized ITX board too this is on the fm2 uh plus platform it's
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going to be compatible with AMD's upcoming cavar CPU it all has PCI
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Express 16x it's got Intel uh Wi-Fi it's
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got all the kind of features that you want black PCB all that kind of stuff so
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you can now finally build a truly performance grade AMD ITX system
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something we haven't really been able to do up until now speaking of other AMD
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designs they now have gaming boards for AMD both in an ATX flavor and an matx
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flavor just as a reminder all MSI's gaming branded boards use their military
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class concept so that is high quality components they also feature audio boost
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which is a headphone amped uh audio output and they also use killer onboard
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networking in order to give give you guys that prioritization feature that
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enables your games to have the highest priority out of all of your network
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traffic of course they come with the usual MSI gaming color scheme which is a
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black and red with a matte PCB look that
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uh will definitely turn some heads the last one here we've got is a completely
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unreleased product this isn't even finished yet in fact it doesn't even
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seem to have a name it's just am1 and
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then on the back there's FS1 I whatever all of these things mean this is an AMD
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kabini board so that's not a proper desktop platform hold on a second what's
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going on well kabini actually has some pretty interesting advantages over some
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of the other processors available one is that it could be powerful enough for a
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relatively low usage desktop number two is it's available in up to an X6
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configuration and number three is the onboard Graphics aren't that bad so
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especially when you factor in the way that AMD is pushing forward on open C
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and compute to increase the performance of overall platform without focusing
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that much on CPU power the fact that you're are going to be able to have a
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socketed upgradeable kabini board and an ITX form factor could be very
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interesting to folks who are looking for something power efficient that's
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powerful enough to do basic stuff like say for example play some Super Meat Boy
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but not necessarily powerful enough for the most you know demanding games but
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could handle something like game streaming on Steam OS where's Linus
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going with this I think I just said it don't miss any of our CES 2014 coverage
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guys our trip to the show is powered by nc.com your source for great technology
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selection and service and of course our other sponsors our Corsair memory and
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Western Digital thanks guys we couldn't have done this without you