MSI trying to Get In The Game
MSI trying to Get In The Game
At a computer games convention you’d expect to see a bit of gaming specific hardware, but all stuff directly related to games such as joypads, steering wheels… the odd mouse mat and that'd be about it. But over on the ATi stand, MSI are showing of something rather special, a running example of its MSI RD480 Neo2 Mainboard.
Now you’ll be thinking that a mainboard we saw back at Computex in Taipei isn’t anything to shout about, except that this particular board was up and running and running with two ATi RADEON X850 XT accelerators.
This is significant as this is the first non-reference ATi Crossfire capable mainboard to appear in public, and with it up and kicking, some might think MSI have stolen a bit of a lead on the competition.
The MSI RD480 Neo2, based on ATi Technologies' RD480 Northbridge and SB450 Southbridge seems to support all AMD Socket 939 CPUs, including Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX and the dual-core Athlon 64 X2.
Other features include four DIMM slots for up to 4GB of DDR 333/400MHz system RAM, 1000MHz Hyper Transport, three 16x PCI-E slots, three PCI slots (one of which is shared), SATA-1 and the latest SATA-2 compatible mass storage controllers, FireWire, dual Gigabit LAN and 7.1 sound support.
And here’s some shots of the ATi Catlayst Control Centre, showing driver details and core speeds. You’ll have to forgive the German, we are in Leipzig after all…
