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The price of £69.95 inc VAT sounds absurdly low as the MSI 970 Gaming is a stylish piece of hardware that has no obvious signs of cost cutting.
It is a regular ATX design with dual graphics slots and three hefty aluminium heatsinks on the PWM 8 phase power hardware and both parts of the chipset. A quick look on the back of the board confirms the three heatsinks are each secured with two screws rather than those nasty plastic pop pins.
Take a step back to look at the bigger picture and you'll realise the 970 chipset is the junior member of the AMD 900 family and only supports dual PCI Express 2.0 slot for two way CrossFire or SLI. If you want three- or four-way graphics you need the 990FX chipset which means you'll be spending £80-£125 on your motherboard.
Apart from using the 970 chipset, MSI has kept costs down by leaving out any frivolous pieces of hardware. You can forget about Power and Reset micro buttons, and the same is true of a POST code debug display or a button for the OC Genie function. That's a sensible decision to keep the cost low.
In an ideal world you would ally your new AMD motherboard with some AMD Radeon R9 DDR3 memory. Apart from the fact that AMD R9 memory is supported by the AMP profile in the BIOS, you'll see in the photos that the colour scheme of the memory matches the MSI 970 Gaming to perfection.
While we appreciate cosmetic good looks we feel the smart black and red styling isn't especially helpful as there is a near-absence of colour coding or printed legends.
The front panel connectors are a case in point as they pretty much oblige you to reach for the manual if you want to plug things together correctly.
Take a look at the I/O panel and you might think it is a bit Spartan however there is plenty on offer. The absence of any graphics connectors means there is plenty of space, despite the fact that you get eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, one PS/2 and a full set of surround sound audio connectors. It doesn't look fancy but you get everything you need.
If you look behind the USB 3.0 ports you can see the tiny VIA VL806 chip that adds the USB 3.0 feature as the aged SB950 Southbridge is limited to USB 2.0.
In fact there are a couple of features worthy of note. The red PS/2 connector supports N-Key rollover keyboards that allow you to press three or more keys in very quick succession without getting a false input. Those two red USB 2.0 ports below the PS/2 support a 1000Hz polling rate (compared to the standard 125Hz rate for USB 2.0) which is intended to give the maximum response for your gaming mouse.
Many gamers are perfectly happy with a standard Gigabit Ethernet connection however the 970 gaming board comes with a Killer NIC that allows you to prioritise game traffic.
There is one annoyance in terms of the layout of the board and that relates to the eight-pin EPS power connector. It sits tight between the I/O connectors and the PWM heatsink and the thing is the wrong way round. When you connect your power supply cables you have very little working room to release the locking latch and will certainly require a screwdriver or some other tool.
MSI has done a fair amount of work on the audio side of things. The Realtek ALC1150 audio chip sits in one corner of the board under the Audio Boost 2 logo where it is protected by EMI shielding and surrounded by Japanese Nichicon capacitors for the audio circuit.
That wibbly wobbly line connecting the audio chip and the audio jacks is an LED path that lights up red when the system is running and appears to be a play on words for ‘audio path' rather than a technical feature. The red audio jack is a dedicated amplified output for headphones.
