MSI 970A-G45

MSI 970A-G45 review

For Joe PC enthusiast, it's often a worry buying a cheap motherboard. How cheap can you go before boards don't have the features you need? Manufacturers must be faced with a bit of a quandary in how to spec out their low-end boards too. This 970A-G45 from MSI is very cheap, so inevitably some sacrifices have had to be made to keep the cost down. Most prevalent is the chipset. Unlike 990X and 990FX boards, models built around the 970 chipset don't support the brand new flavour of AMD-based SLI, but they do support two AMD graphics cards in CrossFireX configuration. SLI slam That makes sense for a £75 board, although it might frustrate owners of multiple Nvidia cards. As a rule of thumb, AMD chipsets play nicer with AMD graphics cards anyway, so you may be backed into a corner as far as GPU choice goes, but at least it's a corner with benefits. In other areas, it's pleasantly bountiful for such a cheap mobo. Like its 990FXA-GD80 cousin (and most 990FX boards) it heaps six SATA 6Gbps ports on its slender PCB. That's great on paper, but alas, their placement gives away the 970A-G45's weaker breeding.