MSI has unveiled a brand new lineup of X870 and X870E AMD motherboard choices, which embody an additional eight-pin PCIe energy connector on the board, boosting the general skill of the board to energy your GPU, CPU, followers, and different parts all on the identical time. You’ll nonetheless want additional energy connectors to plug instantly into your GPU, however these new boards ought to in principle cope higher with the acute energy necessities of top-tier methods.
Whereas this new MSI characteristic definitely isn’t going to be an important one for one of the best gaming motherboards, it’s one you may need to think about if you happen to’re combining a few of the most power-hungry parts in a single system and are contemplating overclocking them too.
The nitty gritty of this characteristic is definitely just a little 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, though it makes use of the identical plug. As a substitute, 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 on 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 durations 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 loads of energy when the 2 parts are mixed. In case you additionally had loads of followers and RGB lighting, this might see the motherboard’s energy supply put below pressure.
In fact, there are already loads of present methods on the market that mix 4090 GPUs with top-tier CPUs with out the necessity for an additional connector, however, it definitely can’t damage to have just a little additional headroom.
The brand new characteristic can be coming to MSI’s AMD X870 and X870E motherboards, that are on account of be launched on September 26, and we suspect the costs for boards with the characteristic can be fairly excessive.
That’s all of the extra purpose why we suggest the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D as our high gaming CPU, because it not solely delivers one of the best gaming efficiency however attracts comparatively little energy too.