MSI Announces X670 & X670E Motherboards for AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000
As Computex 2022 is largely an online event, MSI announced its upcoming AMD X670 and X670E boards shortly after AMD's keynote earlier today. Although the official press release didn't go into too many details, VideoCardz got their hands on more detailed information from MSI, which also brings some additional clarity to the platform as a whole. The most interesting slide is the one that lists the AM5 CPU's as having 28 PCIe 5.0 lanes, rather than the 24 PCIe lanes AMD mentioned in its presentation. This makes sense based on the fact that some X670/E boards have multiple PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots for NVMe drives. MSI's X670E Godlike and X670E Ace even feature three PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, although it's likely that this is in a x8/x8/x4 configuration, as these boards only have a single PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. The same slide also mentions that all Raphael based CPUs will have support for HDMI 2.1 as well as DisplayPort 2.0, which will also work over USB Type-C Alt Mode. Interestingly it seems like not all AM5 CPUs will support DisplayPort 2.0, based on a footnote from MSI.
Other interesting titbits include a minimum CMOS chip size of 32 MB, which hopefully means we won't be seeing a repeat of the issue that the AM4 platform had, where AMD ran out of space for the AGESA, which led to multiple UEFI versions depending on the CPU used with the board. As far as MSI specific features goes, at least the high-end models will be getting eight to 10 layer PCBs and MSI will offer up to 24+2 power phases with improved heatsinks. MSI is also promising 60 W USB PD support for the front USB-C header. Just like ASUS, MSI will also offer an add-in card for more M.2 NVMe drives and MSI calls it the Xpander-Z Gen5 Dual. A common feature among all four boards is that they'll feature AMD's RZ616 WiFi 6E module, which is technically a MediaTek solution.
Other interesting titbits include a minimum CMOS chip size of 32 MB, which hopefully means we won't be seeing a repeat of the issue that the AM4 platform had, where AMD ran out of space for the AGESA, which led to multiple UEFI versions depending on the CPU used with the board. As far as MSI specific features goes, at least the high-end models will be getting eight to 10 layer PCBs and MSI will offer up to 24+2 power phases with improved heatsinks. MSI is also promising 60 W USB PD support for the front USB-C header. Just like ASUS, MSI will also offer an add-in card for more M.2 NVMe drives and MSI calls it the Xpander-Z Gen5 Dual. A common feature among all four boards is that they'll feature AMD's RZ616 WiFi 6E module, which is technically a MediaTek solution.