Bargain-priced AMD 970 board anyone? Anyone?
You might think there’s as much point building a new motherboard based on the elderly AMD 970 chipset as there is making a new transmission for a Model T Ford. But there is some method to MSI’s madness. AMD has more or less given up on its FX range of CPUs, we can pretty much all agree, but it has gone and released some ‘new’ chips over the last six months.
We’re using the floating punctuation there because none of the latest procs are using AMD’s latest x86 CPU architecture, sticking instead with the old, inefficient Piledriver design. It did release the 9000 series processors however, with huge 220W TDPs and ambitious base and turbo clocks. Where this latest board makes sense though is with the lower powered E-series chips AMD also released late last year. The FX-8320E and FX-8370E are both 95W parts and that’s what MSI has designed its 970 Gaming to support.
As you’d expect from a £73 mobo, the 970 Gaming isn’t crammed with features. But it’s not as bad as you might think. There are no PCIe storage interfaces, no PCIe 3.0 slots for your graphics cards and no board-mounted switches for overclocking and the like. No, this is a basic board designed to be dropped into a relatively low-end gaming PC and forgotten about. And to that end it’s pretty effective. Those lacking modern touches aren’t an issue for a board designed for this price point and the PCIe 2.0 slots are enough for the sort of setup you’re going to build with this board too. After all, it’s not the available PCIe bandwidth which will hold back your GPU’s performance – that will be down to the lackadaisical AMD CPUs you’re limited to fitting into it.
Despite the 970 chipset lacking native USB 3.0 support you do still get a handful of compatible ports, thanks to a pair of VIA chips. SATA 6Gbps support is there, offering six little black slots for your storage needs. And even without the OC Genie button on the board itself there’s a software function you can access through the BIOS screen. You can get your hands dirty too and overclock manually – we got our old FX-8350 CPU up to the same 4.6GHz we managed from an Asus 990FX board, so it’s definitely a tempting overclocker.
Inevitably, compared with a 990FX setup, performance is down. Our BF4 numbers were around 10fps lower and straight CPU performance was a fair way off too. But considering the 990FX we’re comparing it to is still over twice the price it’s tough to complain about it.
What’s hard to figure out though, is who we’d think should pick up the 970 Gaming board. For any PC gamer out there, we’d always recommend going for an Intelbased platform. Even if you don’t go for a K-series Core i5, a proper quad-core 4570 with a cheap H97 board will outperform the similarly priced FX-8350, let alone the lower-powered E-series variants. And that’s in both CPU tests and most especially gaming. MSI’s 970 Gaming then is a decent, low-price AMD board. But it’s only really a recommendation for the devout AMD followers determined to boycott an Intel upgrade. – Dave James
SPECIFICATIONS
Chipset AMD 970
CPU socket AM3+
Memory compatibility Dual-channel DDR3
Memory speed Up to 2,133MHz
GPU support 2x PCIe 2.0 x16
Multi GPU support AMD CrossFireX
Storage 6x SATA 6Gbps
Back panel 2x USB 3.0, 8x USB 2.0, PS/2, Optical S/PDIF out, audio in/out, Killer E2205 Gigabit ethernet