MSI has announced the new 970A SLI Krait Edition motherboard, which happens to be the world’s first AMD motherboard with support for USB 3.1.
“AMD and MSI strive to deliver innovation and great products that provide cutting edge features and capabilities for all users,” said Darren Grasby, AMD Corporate VP, Global Channel Sales. “We are very excited to partner with MSI on the launch of the new USB 3.1 powered 970A SLI Krait Edition Motherboard – a highly optimized, feature-rich platform that unleashes the full potential of AMD processors in a powerful solution that also delivers great value and customer experience. The 970A SLI Krait Edition motherboard perfectly caters to those AMD fans who are looking for something different in terms of design and latest specification, but desire nothing but the best in terms of features and power. “
The new motherboard follows AMD’s socket AM3+ infrastructure and offers the somewhat old AMD 970 chipset plus the AMD SB950 south bridge. The board comes with four DDR3 DIMM slots, two legacy PCI slots, two PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots and two PCI-E 2.0 x1 slots. Apart from these expansion slots expect to find high quality components and MSI’s Military Class 4 standard that ensures stability through carefully selected and tested hardware components. In addition the MSI 970A SLI Krait Edition comes with support and optimizations for multiple graphics cards including NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire and additional internal space for improved airflow when using two video cards.
The main feature of the 970A SLI Krait Edition motherboard is USB 3.1, though, and MSI makes sure that you will notice this feature. Things with USB 3.1 are quite simple, however – the new USB standard allows data transfer speeds that reach 10 Gbps, which is two times faster than what USB 3.0 currently offers. The motherboard has two USB 3.1 ports on its back but they are also fully compatible with USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 devices.
Sadly, there’s no information on how much the new MSI 970A SLI Krait Edition costs but we won’t be surprised if you have to pay some more for the provided USB 3.1 support.
Source: MSI