Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by NCI XCOM 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 pesky 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 it's got the usual features you've got a full black back plate as well as a unis ink 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 try frozer cooler so unlike the more traditional twin frozr 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 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 eight pin power connector and it is only a little bit longer about an inch and change longer than the length of a standard pci express slot this goes along with a bit of a focus that msi has here on ITX design so in the past we only really saw we I mean we've seen their dat seven ITX gaming branded motherboard but only on the Intel side will now we're getting an AMD performance optimized ITX board too this is on the FM two plus platform it's going to be compatible with amd's upcoming Kaveri CPU it all has pci express 16x it's got intel 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 nsis gaming branded boards use their military class concept so that is high quality components they also feature audio boost which is a headphone amped audio output and they also use killer on board networking in order to 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 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 a m1 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 X 6 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 opencl and compute to increase the performance of an overall platform without focusing that much on cpu power the fact that you are going to be able to have a socketed upgradable 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 steamos where's Linus going with this I think I just said don't miss any of our CES 2014 coverage guys our trip to the show is powered by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service and of course our other sponsors are corsair Memory and western digital thanks guys we couldn't have done this without you