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MSI has unveiled its upcoming X870 and X870E motherboard range at Gamescom 2024. Cowcotland visited MSI's booth and noticed an interesting addition to these boards. It seems all of them featured an 8-pin PCIe power connector located at the bottom of the boards. But why, you might ask?
We've written extensively about the stability issues affecting Intel's 13th and 14th Gen processors. Both of our Jacobs have covered it thoroughly, with Jacob Fox thoroughly explaining the saga, while Jacob Ridley ran through a suite of benchmarks comparing pre and post-fix BIOSes, which thankfully revealed no noticeable performance penalty.
Back when AMD previewed the Zen 5 architecture, it promised an IPC gain averaging 16% over equivalent Zen 4 parts. While the new chips handily beat out the older ones in heavily threaded benchmarks, the gains were smaller in games. That led to some criticisms, with many gamers believing the new chips didn't offer enough to tempt them to upgrade.
Gamers hoping to build a new Ryzen 9000-series system with an affordable B850 or B840 motherboard will reportedly have quite a wait according to a report from ComputerBase. Motherboards with the budget-friendly chipsets are unlikely to debut before 2025.
Asus has unveiled its initial X870E and X870 motherboard lineup at Gamescom 2024. Asus's regular model tiers are represented, with the ROG, Strix, TUF, ProArt and Prime families all featuring X870/E models. All are compatible with Ryzen 9000-series CPUs out of the box, and all support up-to-date feature sets, including USB4 and WiFi 7.
Two US Congressmen have called on the Biden administration to launch an investigation over concerns that networking products made by the widely used TP-Link brand could be used to covertly spy on Americans, or be used for cyber attacks.
AMD's Ryzen 9000-series processors are out and about. In general, the family's power efficiency is a highlight, and they've rightfully taken some places on our list of best CPUs, but there are those out there that wish for a little more on the performance side of things. Enabling AMD's own PBO2 setting will give you a bit of a boost, but MSI's engineers have been hard at work too, and the company is releasing new motherboard BIOSes with what it calls PBO Enhanced modes, which take things a step further.
Now that the Micro ATX form factor has all-but been relegated to the budget end of the market, Mini-ITX is where it's at if you want to build a high-end small form factor system. But creating such a board with a premium feature set is not easy. It really does present some engineering challenges. The Asus ROG Strix Z790-I Gaming WiFi solves these challenges with some clever innovations, and as a result it manages to pack in a set of features only high-end ATX motherboards can beat.