MSI has unveiled a brand new lineup of X870 and X870E AMD motherboard choices, which embrace an additional eight-pin PCIe energy connector on the board, boosting the general capability of the board to energy your GPU, CPU, followers, and different parts all on the identical time. You’ll nonetheless want further energy connectors to plug straight into your GPU, however these new boards ought to in idea cope higher with the acute energy necessities of top-tier methods.
Whereas this new MSI characteristic definitely isn’t going to be a necessary one for the very best gaming motherboards, it’s one you would possibly wish to contemplate if you happen to’re combining a number of the most power-hungry parts in a single system and are contemplating overclocking them too.
The nitty gritty of this characteristic is definitely somewhat complicated, so let’s break it down. For a begin, this isn’t a cable-management system for a standard eight-pin PCIe graphics card energy cable, within the vein of the latest slew of motherboards which have their connectors flipped spherical and on the again of the board, regardless that it makes use of the identical plug. As an alternative, it’s delivering energy to the entire board.
It’s additionally not fairly the identical because the supplemental energy connectors which were featured on motherboards for some years now both, as these have been particularly required for sure CPUs, whereas this can be a board-wide increase.
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 to your GPU. These eight-pin PCIe cables are usually rated to ship 150W, however the brand new ATX 3.1 commonplace that these boards help permits for a 2.5x energy tour. Which means the ability supply can safely increase past its regular score for brief intervals 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 a whole lot of energy when the 2 parts are mixed. If you happen to additionally had a whole lot of followers and RGB lighting, this might see the motherboard’s energy supply put underneath pressure.
After all, there are already loads of current 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 harm to have somewhat further headroom.
The brand new characteristic will probably be coming to MSI’s AMD X870 and X870E motherboards, that are as a result of be launched on September 26, and we suspect the costs for boards with the characteristic will probably be reasonably excessive.
That’s all of the extra purpose why we advocate the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D as our high gaming CPU, because it not solely delivers the very best gaming efficiency however attracts comparatively little energy too.