Those who wandered around MSI’s booth got a chance to peek at the company’s upcoming motherboard – the MSI 870A-GD60 Hydra.
As the name suggests, the motherboard comes with Lucid’s Hydra chip on AMD’s socket AM3 platform and it is based on AMD’s 870 + SB850 chipset. It features two full-bandwidth PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, three PCI-Express x1 slot and one PCI slot. The board has four DDR3 DIMM slots for dual channel memory.
MSI’s 870-A-GD60 Hydra comes with six internal SATA 6Gbps ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a number of USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, 8 channel HD audio with SPDIF and eSATA via an extra controller.
As you probably concluded for yourself, the Hydra chip will allow for what many fanboys will call sacrilege scenarios, where you can pair up two cards made by Nvidia and ATI. So theoretically, you could take ATI’s HD 5970 card and pair it up with a nice pocket of still marchitectural air called Fermi, and do some DX11 gaming with help from both companies. Well, just one for now.
