MSI's AMD 970 chipset motherboard nearly here

MSI has already launched a couple of higher-end AMD 900-series chipset motherboards, but the company is readying a more affordable model in the shape of the 970A-G45. The board was shown off at Computex, but we've managed to get our hands on a couple of official pictures of the board as well as some pricing.

The board itself isn't anything remarkable, but at least MSI has added a few extra like a heatsink on the MOSFETs, something you don't always get on more basic boards. The PWM design is a simple 4+1 phase layout and although this board isn't targeting overclockers, AMD boards seem to be given much more basic setups here compared to similarly priced Intel boards. It's also good to see that all the heatsinks are screwed in place, rather than using push-pins.



The slot layout leaves a bit to be desired with a pair of x16 PCI Express slots, although the second slot only operates in x4 mode, two x1 PCI Express slost and two PCI slots. Otherwise we're looking at a fairly feature “light” board with the standard six SATA 6Gbps ports and three headers for extra USB 2.0 ports. That pretty much sums up the features, not counting a meagre three fan headers.



Around the back we find a PS/2 port, six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out and oddly enough a serial port. There might not be a ton of features on this board, but for a lot of people it's more than sufficient. Despite this, it's actually a fairly expensive board as it's listed in Europe for about €82 (S$146) making it the second most expensive AMD 970 chipset board out there at the moment.