Monday, August 15th 2022
MSI Publishes its X670 Motherboard Product Pages
A bit late to the game compared to its competitors, MSI has finally published its product pages for three of its upcoming X670 and X670E motherboards. The three models are the MEG X670E ACE, the MPG X670E Carbon WiFi and the Pro X670-P WiFi. Earlier todaywe got a first hint with regards to the pricing of a couple of these boards and now we have most of the technical details with regards to the boards themselves. As with all other boardmakers, MSI hasn't revealed any information with regards to memory clocks and obviously no details about which CPUs will be supported. We already had a pretty good idea what to expect from these boards based on the details MSI released at Computex, but features like the power design weren't revealed at the time, nor did we get a very good look at the board.
The MEG X670E ACE appears to be MSI's high-end board for those that aren't interested in spending a small fortune on the Godlike board and it should cater to just about all needs. The board has a 22+2+1 phase power design and MSI is using a heatpipe as well as a stacked fin-array heatsink and a MOSFET backplate to help cool the oversized power circuitry. Other features include 10 Gbps Ethernet, although there is only one Ethernet interface, a DisplayPort 1.4 compatible USB-C 10 Gbps port (which was said to be DP 2.0 compliant at Computex), as well as two 20 Gbps USB-C ports around the back. USB4 is nowhere to be seen, but is most likely related to ASMedia being late to the game with its host controller. MSI has gone for a design where the x16 PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU are split between the first two PCIe x16 slots and the third slot is using four lanes of PCIe 5.0 from the CPU. The final four PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU are for one of the M.2 NVMe slots and the board has a further three M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots. On top of that, MSI also includes an M.2 Xpander-Z Gen5 Dual add-in card that can accept a further two PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD at the cost of eight PCIe lanes from the GPU.
The MPG X670E Carbon WiFi gets a slightly trimmed power regulation design with 18+2+1 phases and sadly loses the stacked fin-array heatsink, but does at least retain the heatpipe for the MOSFETS. MSI has also dropped the 10 Gbps Ethernet port in favour of a 2.5 Gbps port and the third PCIe x16 slot is only PCIe 4.0 on the Carbon. However, the Carbon gets two PCIe 5.0 M.2 NVMe slots onboard and has a further two PCIe 5.0 M.2 NVMe slots. IF you're looking at taking advantage of the expected integrated graphics in the upcoming Ryzen 7000-series CPUs, then this might be the board for you, as it has an HDMI 2.1 port, a DP 1.4 port and a USB-C port with DP 1.4 support. There's a second USB-C 20 Gbps port around the back as well. The MPG X670E Carbon WiFi looks like it should be a well rounded board for most people.
Finally the Pro X670-P WiFi gets a 14+2+1 power design and this time around MSI has dropped the heatpipe, although the company has still applied a rather large heatsink. MSI dropped most of the niceties on the Pro, as gone is the pre-attached I/O shield and not all M.2 slots come with heatsinks. Somewhat surprisingly, MSI includes a 20 Gbps USB-C port here and the display outputs are identical to the Carbon. This is the only board from MSI to offer up a PCIe 3.0 x1 expansion slot and as this is an X670 board, the three x16 slots are all PCIe 4.0, although the configuration is x16, x4 and x2, with none of the lanes being shared. The board has a single PCIe 5.0 M.2 NVMe slot and three PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe slots.
All three boards rely on eight-layer PCBs with two ounce copper layers. MSI has also included screwless M.2 drives installation on all boards, with the higher-end models also have screwless heatsinks on some of the M.2 slots. All three models also have a Realtek ALC408x USB audio codec, with the ACE gaining an ESS ES9280AQ DAC as well. Overall it looks like MSI is going to have a small, but pretty solid range of X670 and X670E motherboards.
Source:
MSI
The MEG X670E ACE appears to be MSI's high-end board for those that aren't interested in spending a small fortune on the Godlike board and it should cater to just about all needs. The board has a 22+2+1 phase power design and MSI is using a heatpipe as well as a stacked fin-array heatsink and a MOSFET backplate to help cool the oversized power circuitry. Other features include 10 Gbps Ethernet, although there is only one Ethernet interface, a DisplayPort 1.4 compatible USB-C 10 Gbps port (which was said to be DP 2.0 compliant at Computex), as well as two 20 Gbps USB-C ports around the back. USB4 is nowhere to be seen, but is most likely related to ASMedia being late to the game with its host controller. MSI has gone for a design where the x16 PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU are split between the first two PCIe x16 slots and the third slot is using four lanes of PCIe 5.0 from the CPU. The final four PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU are for one of the M.2 NVMe slots and the board has a further three M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots. On top of that, MSI also includes an M.2 Xpander-Z Gen5 Dual add-in card that can accept a further two PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD at the cost of eight PCIe lanes from the GPU.
40 Comments on MSI Publishes its X670 Motherboard Product Pages
Hopefully that's the case, I don't know how you logically wait till the first quarter of next year to make AM5 even somewhat accessible at the consumer level especially given your competition
www.techpowerup.com/296161/asrock-shares-some-more-details-about-its-x670e-taichi-motherboard
and this
www.techpowerup.com/296580/asrock-x670e-pro-rs-motherboard-product-page-goes-live
Asus has had one board up for quite some time.
Sorry if I was a couple of days late on noticing, but no-one else seems to have picked up when MSI put it up either.It seems to be all through the front port, I think I've only seen one board that does it via a rear port.WiFi and Ethernet or something along those lines.You're not getting more than 1.5-2A without it though and even 20-30 W would be nice, which no-one seems to implement.On a few SKUs, yes. And it's USB4, not USB 4.
Ironic when the rest of it was poop :P
The simple 'memory try it' presets were something other brands need to imitate
What the actual FUCK is the point of having the highest-end chipset and not having its PCIe lanes exposed via the PCIe slots? I don't understand what universe that MSI lives in whereby users are going to have 4 NVMe SSDs but no secondary PCIe card.
If the manufacturers want to put 20 billion NVMe slots on their boards, that's fine. Just also add circuitry so that the PCIe slots by default have all lanes allocated to them, and every time you plug in an NVMe SSD it steals 4 of the slot lanes. So you'd start off with an x16 slot, then it would go down to x12, then x8, then x4, and finally x0 with 4 NVMe slots populated.
If that's too complex (and apparently it is), just go with the solution that everyone knows works - a separate PCB that can house up to 4 NVMe SSDs and plugs into a PCIe x16 slot.
Honestly these artificial limitations are really putting me off Zen 4. I shouldn't have to buy the highest-end chipset to get more than one PCIe slot running at x16, for fuck's sake.