In a press conference centered around the Intel Sandy Bridge and the supporting desktop motherboard and notebooks that MSI is introducing, we caught sight of a slightly hidden motherboard.  There really hasn’t been a whole lot from AMD about the upcoming AM3+ socket architecture, but today was the first sight of a high end 990FX motherboard from MSI.

CES 2011: Sneak peek of the MSI AMD 990FX Motherboard - Motherboards 3

There are a couple of things that really pop out at you.  The first is the Military Grade II components that MSI introduced today with the latest P67 motherboards at the high end.  DrMOS drivers and High-C caps are not new, but the Dynamic Switching SFCs (super ferrite choke) are an upgrade.

The mosfets are covered by a very small heatsink, and we are not really sure if the final heatsink is going to be as small as this.  The board is still in the very same vein as the current 890FXA-GD70, with multiple PCI-E 16X slots and CrossFire X support.

The big question that we have is if the BIOS for this board will be the older, standard BIOS.  Or will it in fact utilize the new UEFI type BIOS.  Another thing that MSI is doing is utilizing more USB 3.0 ports and controllers than are usually available.  Again, this is a very raw engineering board which may or may not be finalized.

While AMD will certainly take a hit this coming first half of the year due to Sandy Bridge, they are not standing still and are preparing the market for the Bulldozer processors due to be coming out before this coming summer.


CES 2011: Sneak peek of the MSI AMD 990FX Motherboard - Motherboards 4