Gadgetory

- tech tips coverage of Computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital our trusted gaming gear partner is Corsair Vengeance and our trusted retail partner is NCI XCOM time for our look at MSI components so right here we've got something bad ok it's a little bit different from what we saw before and that it's completely different from what we saw before the first time we saw OC certified from MSI was with their z77 mPower board and what OC certified meant was they were going to use enthusiast grade overclocking tools and stability testing tools such as prime95 and do an actual burnin on actually every single board before it ships meaning at an overclock setting meaning that pretty much no matter what unless something disastrous happens in transit that motherboard will overclock regardless now that concept has been expanded incredibly since last generation so now not only is there an empower motherboard now we've got an empower Maxx as well as an X power motherboard that are both undergoing the same OSI certified routine so they have to run they have to overclock and they have to be able to survive at extremely high temperatures now that's been expanded to motherboards video cards and even partner products such as this of X here Ram so let's move over to our right here you can have a look right here reference boards what do they typically get tested at maybe a few hours of burnin MSI is testing for 24 hours on every single board now obviously overclocking is never guaranteed but certainly if you use their easy tools such as OC Genie which is you're going to find on the X power right here which also has all the usual onboard switches in addition to some other cool onboard switches you've got uh-huh Wow you've got 10 SATA 3/6 gigabit per second poor it's a couple USB three front panel ports you've got dip switches that looks like you can actually enable and disable separate PCI Express slots you've got a ton of lighting effects so these X's on the on the vrm cooling solution up here actually are illuminated in addition to the MSI logo down here on the chipset cooler the MSI logo here on the bottom the board and their audio booth solution which has a yellow line all the way down for the separate PCB so audio boost is a concept that we're seeing on quite a few of the boards including their o ce certified boards as well as their gaming boards that allows them to drive up to 600 ohm headphones and they're using much higher quality more audio tuned components in order to deliver better performance now I've been an advocate of better onboard sound on motherboards for a long time I haven't personally tried audio boost yet but I'm extremely excited to give it a crack we've also got some video cards so there's there's gtx 770 lightning which i haven't had a chance to check out yet but if it's anything like their previous lightning addition cards i'm expecting it to be pretty much awesome they're 7970 lightning is here and they have a gtx 780 lightning which they are refusing to show to anybody is a completely new completely different design and there's not much for me to say about it other than the fact that i can't look at it and neither can you okay so that was overclocking optimized boards now we're gonna have a look at some gaming optimized board what's makes it what makes a motherboard Gaming optimized I mean whoa Kay we've seen color scheme we've seen overclocking optimizations which obviously help with gaming as well because more performance is never ever ever a bad thing but that's not really what it's all about MSI actually launched and this was a very strange product launch to me there z77 gaming series boards very close to the end of the z77 platform being the flagship platform but I guess what they were trying to do is test it out and find out if this was a concept that really resonated and they did a few things differently so number one is they added killer Niki 2200 networking which allows you to have Network prioritization that's built directly into your board I mean I was never a huge advocate of the killer Nick but the problem was that the thing cost over $100 I mean it performed better than on board Nick solutions at the time but it was unbelievably expensive for what you were getting well now it's built into your motherboard I mean we're talking about a 10 $15 adder for a gaming edition board from MSI versus a regular board so you get the killer Nick now you get it for 15 bucks ok now that's a more compelling value add you're also getting their new audio boost solution which means that they're improving the onboard audio solution I personally find that in addition to visuals great audio is a huge part of the gaming experience and doesn't really get enough attention we also see a whole bunch of other stuff that we've seen before from MSI so they've got their OC Genie one-button overclocking because quite frankly the line between gamers and hardware enthusiasts is more pronounced than you think many people just want to focus on the game they don't want to focus necessarily on you know tuning the base clock and increasing the multiplier but if you do want to do that we have an overclocking guide for the Haswell platform just throwing that out there but if you don't want to do that you press a button you overclock it no big deal they've also got their military class concept continuing with a fourth-generation and that has earned them some interesting recognition so they won the context Taipei BC golden Award for this particular motherboard they were the only motherboard to win this award and there's a couple of reasons why so number one is the features number two is the quality that they are going for with this particular product so I don't know if you're gonna be able to see this that well but it's the first motherboard that they've actually had I don't remember how to pronounce that but whatever it's certify it's a German certification where basically they figured this board based on the quality of the components is probably good for about a twenty five year lifetime which I can pretty much tell you with the pace that technology moves that you're not gonna want to be using it in 25 years so your motherboards gonna last longer than you could possibly want it to it's gonna be like that car that like it's got like 300,000 kilometers on it you just you don't want it to run anymore but it just does and I mean I that's good right so there you have it we've also got some more components of the ecosystem so in addition to the gaming braid motherboards they're doing gaming themed video cards so these some kinds of cards such as a GTX 780 gaming 770 gaming and 650 ti boost gaming are going to continue these concepts such as military class components all that cool stuff in addition to actually matching the boards making so you can have a more color-coordinated build overall thank you for checking out our coverage of MSI's components here at the booth don't miss any of our country text 2013 videos and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips