Gadgetory

hey what's up everybody Jays $0.02 here and I've been promising you guys some AMD material and here it is today we're going to be taking a look at the brand-new msi 978 sli crate edition motherboard for AMD FX cpus and 3 plus now what makes this motherboard so special well it is the first AMD motherboard with USB 3.1 the new EVGA silent series power supplies offer excellent silence and efficiency through their new EVGA eco-mode technology and also features a seven-year warranty for worryfree gaming click the link in the description to learn more now I don't think many people would disagree with me with saying that I think AMD enthusiasts have felt very left out lately and I'm not just talking about on my channel I'm talking about for the most part of being a PC enthusiast a gaming enthusiast and an AMD fan at the same time because when you're an enthusiast and you're a fan of something you want to see it evolve and grow and become better and better well if you're a fan of AMD especially of their gaming series are their FX line of CPUs you've definitely felt like that's been a bit lackluster over the last couple of years and if you don't feel that way then you haven't really been following some of the progress AMD's really put a lot of its R&D into its apu technology which is doing fantastic but true gamers like to get raw CPU and GPU performance so that means the FX line is kind of where your interests are now what's happening here is the board partners are the ones that are having to come up with the designs of the boards to try and implement the most custom and current feature sets for an older generation of CPU I mean don't get mad at me for saying that the FX CPU is an older generation it really is it's a reason why you see 2011 stamped on the top of all of the heat spreaders it really is a four year old design and that's pretty old in CPU architecture let's go ahead and start with kind of a meat-and-potatoes of the motherboard here we're going to talk about slot options here now you have two PCI slots on this and now that that makes sense I guess considering the fact that PCI is not PCI Express by the way PCI slots are still native to the chipset AMD's using back from 2011 as I've already mentioned so it makes sense that they put them on there I don't know how many people are still running PCI slotted peripherals whether it be graphics car not graphics cards but audio cards or network cards most of the time you're going to be running something PCI Express nowadays you do have two PCI Express One X on here as well as two PCI Express 2.0 16 X slots now some people freak out over the idea of them being PCI Express Gen 2 but they're still not being saturated even with current graphics cards you're going to have more than enough bandwidth on PCI Express 2.0 16x for your favorite graphics cards and not be worried about saturating those PCIe lanes now because there's only two PCI Express slots you're only going to be able to run two graphics cards it's kind of I guess it's kind of obvious the way the math worked out on that one but let's go and talk about what kind of graphics cards you could run on here you could run to Titan X's you grow in to 290 X's you can run to the new fury cards or whatever they going to be called and you wouldn't really have a problem is supported so you can run Nvidia or AMD on here but because it's the 970 a chipset and not the 990 FX this graphics card will not support quad fire or four-way SLI or Quad SLI now the difference there is a quad fire would be running something like 2 to 95 X 2's which would give you total 4 GPUs or running something like 2 Titans YZ which I don't think anyone should do for 4 GPUs on the Nvidia side you simply are not going to be able to do that on here because the 978 chipset is not going to support that now onboard audio is a surround audio with their isolated circuitry on there which a lot of motherboard manufacturers are doing now so you don't get any noise interference from the board itself and then you do have massive heat sinks here on both the VRMs and the North Bridge and the South Bridge you have a lot of cooling on here that's me picking up air from your case airflow cooling off the motherboard components itself now on the side of the motherboard here you have high quality chokes you have high quality capacitors they're all black they look very very sleek 24-pin power 3.0 USB 3.0 plug on the bottom and then all of your USB plugs front side panel etc etc all your front up you know power reset button for your harddrive and peripherals you do have four SATA three six gigabit per second on the side here as well as two additional here on the top of the motherboard now this thing does also support ram disk which is kind of neat and MSI has their own built in Ram disk configurator and it's all contained in their BIOS so you could easily set up Ram disk set up onboard raid it's not going to be any problems whatsoever but as we mentioned earlier in this video this is the first ambi motherboard to feature the new USB 3.1 standard now it is the what looks like the standard USB 3.0 plug but it has USB 3.1 for up to 10 gigabit per second performance that is extremely fast but continuing on the back here for i/o you do have six USB 2.0 two USB 3.0 ps2 plugs on the back here for old-school gamers who like to use their lag-free input devices and then you do have a Gigabit Ethernet card now the motherboard is made with a nice matte PCB on here which is very thick very multi-layered there military class 4 so it's very very heavy-duty it's actually a decently weighted motherboard so it's not going to be easy to break I don't suggest you go trying to bend it in half or anything but it's really going to hold up now for fan control you do have two PWM fan headers on here and then you have one system fan plug so I would have liked to have seen more built-in fan headers on this thing but considering the price point and the fact that it's a 970 a it does it makes sense that there are a ton of fan headers on this thing so you're probably going to need to get a fan controller if you're putting this in a system that has a lot of fans so there you go guys that's the msi 970 a sli crate edition with the nice white and black theme it's kind of nice to see an AMD motherboard that's not read I mean it's cool that AMD likes red that's their color and all AMD red team and all that sort of stuff but I like that msi kind of went against the grain I made a black and white one so you guys could come up with some really nice black and white themed build just would look really good in like an r5 or an r4 it's good to see companies like MSI giving upgraded features to people who are still very enthusiast over an older platform so it kind of pulls you guys into a little bit more of a modern era on a bit of an aging platform the last thing to talk about on this thing is overclocking because is the FX line is pretty decent with overclocking so how does this thing do well it gives you the features that you're going to need to do some basic overclocks the 978 chipset isn't exactly known as being you know the the toughest overclocking motherboards that's really set aside for the 990 FX a or 990 FX chipsets but you do have access to all the basic features that the average overclocker would want you have voltage control multiplier control frontside bus control loan light calibration control all the things that you would need to get yourself a fairly decent overclock putting something like an 80 320 or an 80 350 or even in 83 70 up into the 4.5 plus gigahertz range which is definitely going to give you a nice boost in performance on your AMD FX CPU so even though this is a 970 a they still give you a lot of the features that you would want basic features to get some pretty decent overclocks without really having to get too deep and deal with some of the really over complicated settings like you would find on say the crosshair 5 motherboard so there you go guys the msi 970 a sli crate Edition motherboard it's nice to see that MSI hasn't given up on the FX line of AMD CPUs the am3+ chip is definitely aged I mean like I said 2011 stamped on the top of those CPUs but they're still bringing you current feature sets integrated into their motherboard still coming out with AMD FX motherboards which is great to see so people who are building a lower-cost budget-minded PC can still get modern features without having to completely break their bank by going with an Intel build so there you go guys tell me what you think of this motherboard brand new on the market first USB 3.1 motherboard for AMD really happy to see that so I'm interested to see how you guys feel about this how do you feel about the black and white it's not common we see AMD motherboards that aren't red or black or blue I mean really this is like nice monochrome theme you could do like an r5 build with this or an r4 build with this with fractal and get a real nice kind of like Paul's arctic panther you could get a really nice monochrome colored build with this thing so there you go guys hope you've enjoyed today's video taking a look at some AMD stuff I promised I swear we're still doing the AMD build that I've been tee forever it's right there you just can't see it the problem is I've now encountered a problem with my test bench that's requiring me to change out my motherboard what just put me back more when it comes to time with III next week and some more 980ti stuff coming and other projects that I have to get done that has been set off just a little bit but I swear we are going to do the AMD night it we are going to do the AMD 8350 overclocked versus Intel 5820k overclocked using the same GPUs back and forth and comparing performance to see whether or not you really do have to spend a lot of money to get good gaming computers I promise that videos coming just bear with me I'm one person and it's a lot to get done and it doesn't help when we have to deal with equipment that has to be swapped out anybody want to work for peanuts anyway guys time to get out of here thanks for watching follow on social media if you have any questions as always we will see you in the next one