Gadgetory

we just saw the first M for boards that we've seen thus far for Andy's forthcoming Zen architecture and the a.m. for boards that we saw we're hosted by MSI at CES 2017 they were the X 370 titanium overclocking board at a be 350 mid-range board before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by Thermaltake and their core p3 chassis which now has a tempered glass alternative you can find a link in the description below because it serves a good test bench as well starting with the X 370 titanium the main things to point out about this board immediately would it be the power setup so if you look near the CPU there's an 8 + 4 power pin setup so that's your traditional EPS 12 volt 8 pin and then an additional 4 pin and that is for extra overclocking power I don't have hard specs for how much power can be driven to the CPU through this board or how much the CPU might want because AMD hasn't really told us yet but it's there if you want it the other board the b3 50 uses just a typical 8 pin setup so this is something special to the titanium series we look at the south of the board you'll see an extra 6 pin PCI II header on the motherboard and that is to provide power to the PCIe slots for graphics overclocking this is something we've seen in the past for example EVGA x99 classified also has this set up and that helps by providing more power of course the GPU it can take some load off of the PCIe bus as well for power transfer depending on what's configured and how much overclocking you're trying to do walking around the board this one gets rid of a lot of the sort of less functional features for example the RGB LEDs there are none that's a good thing this is an overclocking focus board they don't care about things like that for this unit you'd have to look at the Pro carbon series which will exist for am 4 but hasn't been shown yet so since there are none of these sort of non functional features functional features we have include the typical OC button that's located in the bottom right of the board it can toggle so you can actually swivel the button and rotate it to use different pre-programmed to overclock settings that you program through the software and that's done through MSI's gaming software as usual next to that your typical power and reset buttons nothing special there there's a CMOS reset button on the back if you care about it and we have some b-roll of the i/o the rear i/o you can just look at that and figure out how many different ports there are and that gives us some early insight as to the lane availability since Andy hasn't given us much yet for Zen or for the X 370 chipset the X 370 X power titanium is either an 8 + 4 vrm design or 6 plus 2 MSI told us both numbers but you can see b-roll of the vrm for now and we'll look at it more closely with build Zoid in the future the X power Titanium's of erm is capable of handling well over 250 amps from what MSI tells us flipping the board over you'll see in these shots that there's a MUX setup on the back so this is what would allow in theory anyway for the 16 lanes from the CPU to be split off into 2 by 8 so if you want to do multi-gpu set up these are the chips that would handle it kind of like when you look at a PLA expects chip on any other board that does this type of thing and I don't have a price for the X power titanium motherboard yet we don't have any prices for anything related to a m4 or Zen go figure but it'll be up there this one will definitely be a more expensive board just by looking at it you can see the component quality and focus on overclocking does mean it will be a bit more expensive the be 350 board is the one that's supposed to be cheaper that's the tomahawk so this is another line that exists for MSI you can find a tomahawk boards with the Intel 200 series chipsets if you want an idea of how they stack up versus the pro carbon and things like that in terms of price but the tomahawk is a be 350 chipset and it is also more limited in its overclocking endeavors so one of those examples the most obvious one would be the vrm the BRM for the tomahawk is a 4 + 2 setup and that one is about a 200 amp throughput so I don't know what kind of overclocking will be enabled on B 350 but depending on that it's probably plenty of power we'll see I really have to have the chip in hand and test it to tell you it seems fine though now other things on the board I suppose the PCIe slots below them you might have noticed that there's PCI slots two of them knotti just PCI so why is that there well it's for from what MSI tells us it's emerging markets which is common that's something normally like China market would use these serial ports comm ports things like that you'll sometimes find them on new motherboards the reason is often just because they need to support a wide market then the US Europe where they might be using those older devices whether it's for industrial use or just because they happen to have a lot of them and use them so to that end not only is PCI on there but there's also a combo port where you can hook up those legacy printers if you so desired in terms of things that are relevant for gaming it's really just a pretty straightforward motherboard it looks like maybe ideally with one GPU I'm not sure what the Lane setup will be the muxing was a bit different versus the titanium which you would expect vrm is a lot simpler it does have the reinforced slots I guess which on memory one thing here you'll notice that these motherboard vendors now are all putting the sort of steel or armor plating on PCIe and on their memory slots on PCIe it makes a little bit of sense because if you're an SI and you ship a unit maybe there's some concern with it falling out ripping the slot out of the board more likely what happens is a few people have pulled on the cards too hard without releasing the clip and then they rip the PCIe slot of the motherboard more likely still is that it's just marketing at least Islamic sent on the memory this one is not for reinforcement physically as much as it as it is just extra grounding points and that's something we'll talk about more in the future whether or not it's relevant but that's really all we have for you in terms of the two motherboards that MSI had you can find a link in the description below for more information and we hopefully will have some more Zen or rise in information coming out of this show so as always patreon link in the post well video to help us out directly thank you for watching link the description below subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you