MSI Showcases Ivy Bridge Motherboard Lineup at CES

MSI showed its line of motherboards for Intel’s processors codenamed Ivy Bridge at CES. The boards are equipped with the lga1155 socket and the new Series 7 chipset. MSI also showed its new X79 mother offer.

The Series 7 chipset is suitable for the new 22nm Ivy Bridge processors from Intel, which should be released in April. The chipset has built-in USB 3.0 and SATA-600 connectivity and the boards are equipped with PCI Express 3.0 slots.

The two Series 7 boards that MSI showed are the Z77A-GD65 and Z77A-GD80. The GD65 features three PCI Express x16 slots and four x1 slots. The GD80 has the same number of x16 and x1 slots, but has a slightly different SATA and USB configuration. However, the ‘claim to fame’ of the GD80 is its Thunderbolt connection, which was not yet soldered onto the board shown. The chip makes the GD80 board about $30 more expensive than the GD65.

MSI’s new flagship is the Big Bang XPower II, which is suitable for Sandy Bridge E processors from an X79 chipset. The lga2011 socket is flanked by two times four memory slots and an extensive twenty-two-phase power supply. The board has no less than seven x16 slots for video cards, four of which are generation 3.0 slots. There are no x1 slots, but there are six USB 3.0 and six SATA 600 ports. Cover features such as readout points for voltages, extra power connectors and double bios are of course present.