While over at the MSI booth yesterday, company officials proudly gave us a preview of their upcoming flagship 890FX-GD70 motherboard based on the AMD 890FX chipset. Back in August, we learned directly from AMD that it had internally delayed its 890FX chipset until April 2010, with initial production starting this month. It looks as if this will be the first board to support the chipset until volume production begins over the next several weeks.
The board that MSI was able to show us was in final production stages, complete with both a two-port USB 3.0 controller from NEC and a SATA 6Gbps controller. Based on the fact that the AMD 890FX chipset serves as the successor to the high-end 790FX chipset, one can make the correct assumption that this board is designed for the enthusiast market niche, and rightly so.
In particular, it features a 5-phase digital PWM design with DrMOS technology, up to 16GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory and a grand total of seven SATA 6Gbps connectors. In addition, it features Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel HD audio, eSATA, Firewire and an always-welcomed IDE port.
As far as GPU connectivity is concerned, the 890FX-GD70 employs six PCI-E 2.0 slots and supports Quad-CrossFireX using four discrete single-GPU cards from AMD. The exhibitors at MSI were running a similarly-loaded board with four Radeon HD 5870s in Quad-CrossFireX without any problems. Pricing is unknown at this point in time, but we will definitely be keeping our eyes on any updates from MSI and from AMD regarding the 890FX chispet.
