gaming motherboard made its debut here at Cebit this week, the Z77A-G45 Gaming. This motherboard like most of MSI's other high end products utilized their Military Class III high quality components.

The board utilizes Intel's Z77 chipset and supports 32GB DDR3 memory through 4 DIMM slots. MSI has support through the BIOS to for over-clocking the memory up to 3000MHz. Like most modern motherboards USB 2.0, USB 3.0, and SATA 6Gb/s are all supported support. The PCI-e 3.0 slots also enable users to use either SLI or Crossfire configurations.





Recently MSI standardized on the Sound Blaster Cinema suite of audio technologies for their gaming motherboards. The Sound Blaster Cinema 7.1 audio which is featured on this design allows users to enjoy upgraded surround sound through their stereo headphones, as well as enhanced gaming sound effects. The chipset also features smart volume control for long gaming sessions.

Another main component in this system is a dedicated network processing unit (NPU) utilizing Qualcomm's Killer E2200 chipset. The chip allows for classification, prioritization, as well as network traffic mitigation. This allows these tasks to be offloaded from the CPU and OS to provide users with extra performance. Another feature of NPU is that it bypasses the Microsoft Windows network stack by sending specific traffic around the it. This keeps applications from having to wait for the OS to perform multiple operations including classifying, sorting and preparing the data for exchange

Last but not least MSI has chosen to add a dedicated Gaming Device Port. This USB port is optimized for high polling rate mice (500 to 1000 Hz) which are up to 8 times faster than traditional USB mice. The additional gold plating on the ports was added to enhance the durability.



MSI has not announced pricing but expects the board to be on shelves later this month.



