MSI today launched their AMD 9-Series chipsets products: the 990FXA-GD80 and 990FXA-GD65 mainboards. Both of these boards are ready for AMD 'Bulldozer' octa-core AM3+ CPUs when they arrive later this year. The AMD 9-series isn't that different from the 8-series that it replaces. In fact, the block diageam from the both series would look the same, so the biggest difference is certainly socket AM3+ and the ability to support upcoming AM3+ packaged processors. Read on to see how the MSI 990FXA-GD80 motherboard compared to an 890FX board from ASRock!
AMD released the 900-series of chipsets this morning at Computex 2011 to show the world that they are preparing for the upcoming released of the AM3+ processors by releasing platforms with the new AM3+ socket. This is an evolutionary change or progression of the socket AM3 infrastructure, which means that this new socket will be backward compatible with existing AM3 processors. This is great news for existing AMD customers as you can upgrade your motherboard today well in advance of the Zambezi processors. So, the most important point of this entire launch is that the AMD 9-series of chipsets fully supports upcoming 8-Core AMD CPU's thanks to the AM3+ socket. The other main feature for AMD 9-series is the ability for motherboard partners to purchase NVIDIA SLI licenses for these boards....
I am scratching my head at AMD putting the 990 boards on the market without the CPUs. From what I have been reading all day supposedly the first couple Zambezi steppings have had performance issues and they are getting delayed. One site I saw thinks they will launch in July, but not be widely available until Sept. Another speculates they wont even launch until Sept.
Which sucks because I am probably going to upgrade within the next month and I wont have an AMD option.
I can see it working for some. For example, if you have an AM3 processor and an nVidia video card, you can upgrade now to this mobo, throw in another video card in SLI and enjoy immediate performance upgrade an USB3.0- then upgrade to an AM3+ processor later when you feel the need to without additional costs.
A small request with future a motherboard review. As of now with a BIOS based board you are limited to a 2TB boot drive. With Windows 7 and a UEFI board you are supposed to be able to boot up to a 17TB drive/array. Is this the case? A little more than a year ago I bought 4 1TB Samsung F1 drives to run in RAID 0. I couldn't for the life of me get Intel's software in the BIOS to see the array as bootable. Turns out it was the 2TB limit I had no idea existed. Is there anyway you can confirm or deny these claims with the next UEFI board you guys test.
Another limitation is you need to use a GPT partition in Windows, but UEFI itself has this built inside of it's own logic structure. There isn't really anything they can change in the UEFI Structure to Enable or Disable this. It'll just be "always on"
