MSI has unveiled a brand new lineup of X870 and X870E AMD motherboard choices, which embrace an additional eight-pin PCIe energy connector on the board, boosting the general potential of the board to energy your GPU, CPU, followers, and different elements all on the similar time. You’ll nonetheless want further energy connectors to plug immediately into your GPU, however these new boards ought to in concept cope higher with the intense energy necessities of top-tier techniques.
Whereas this new MSI characteristic actually isn’t going to be an important one for the most effective gaming motherboards, it’s one you would possibly wish to think about in case you’re combining among the most power-hungry elements in a single system and are contemplating overclocking them too.
The nitty gritty of this characteristic is definitely a little bit complicated, so let’s break it down. For a begin, this isn’t a cable-management system for a traditional eight-pin PCIe graphics card energy cable, within the vein of the current slew of motherboards which have their connectors flipped spherical and on the again of the board, although it makes use of the identical plug. As an alternative, it’s delivering energy to the entire board.
It’s additionally not fairly the identical because the supplemental energy connectors which have been featured on motherboards for some years now both, as these have been particularly required for sure CPUs, whereas this can be a board-wide enhance.
What the brand new connector does, then, is present an additional 252W of peak energy to the board as an entire, together with the PCIe slot in your GPU. These eight-pin PCIe cables are usually rated to ship 150W, however the brand new ATX 3.1 customary that these boards help permits for a 2.5x energy tour. Meaning the facility supply can safely enhance past its regular score for brief intervals of time.
MSI provides the instance of partnering an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X with an MSI Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim X 24G, which might draw numerous energy when the 2 elements are mixed. In case you additionally had numerous followers and RGB lighting, this might see the motherboard’s energy supply put beneath pressure.
After all, there are already loads of current techniques on the market that mix 4090 GPUs with top-tier CPUs with out the necessity for an additional connector, however, it actually can’t harm to have a little bit further headroom.
The brand new characteristic will probably be coming to MSI’s AMD X870 and X870E motherboards, that are as a result of be launched on September 26, and we suspect the costs for boards with the characteristic will probably be somewhat excessive.
That’s all of the extra motive why we advocate the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D as our high gaming CPU, because it not solely delivers the most effective gaming efficiency however attracts comparatively little energy too.