MSI

Just as the previous years MSI had a rather large booth, exposing very detailed their complete product ranges.

MSI doesn't only make mainboards and video cards. Laptops (see further down this page) and mice / webcams / USB sticks / BT sticks / ... are also on their repertoire. Here you can see a small overview of their current products.



Let's save the nature by cutting down trees and use them as laptop casings. ;-)
MSI already had some special laptop designs (Just think of Swarovski on some of their laptops). But now we have a wooden designed laptop. This for the moment still is a prototype, not sure if it will ever hit retail market.



A laptop that will be released more likely in the near future is this carbon looking laptop.



MSI is reintroducing the Turbo button. Where it was used in the past to speed up computers, it has a multifunctional purpose nowadays.
If the laptop is plugged in on the AC circuit, pushing the turbo button will make it work faster. The cpu got a 400 Mhz boost, coming from 2.2 GHz and jumping to a nice 2.6 GHz.
But if you're running on batteries, and push the turbo button then, clock speeds go down, just as the brightness of the screen. This will give you some extra minutes working with the battery.



And here we have the P45 DDR3 counterpart.



AMDs' Phenom processor isn't really a big hit amongst enthusiasts. But that doesn't stop MSI for designing new boards. Here you can see the latest high end board, the K9A2 Platinum.



Below we see the P45 Diamond. The chipset cooling is not present, as it wasn't released yet on Cebit. It's the successor of the looping/rollercoaster heatpipe construction.
Besides that, what's so special about this board ?
We find 6 SATA ports just below the memory slots, 7 more in the down right corner, and 2 (not visible on the picture) on the rear I/O panel. Giving a total of a whopping 15 SATA ports.



And here we have the DDR3 counterpart.



And the P7N, Nvidia chipset based 775 mainboard. Here we still can see the previous chipset cooling construction.



Finally in our short mainboard tour, we see the MSI G45M. This board is equipped with the Intel G45 chipset which has the GMA X4500HD video accelerator. High Definition playback shouldn't be an issue.



On to the video card wall. The two biggest cards are the already known AMD radeon 3870 X2 in the upper right corner. The other big card is the much anticipated Nvidia 9800 GX2. The card is released on the 18th of march.



The first day we couldn't see the card anywhere on Cebit, but as from day two (after some leaked pictures) Nvidia gave their partners the authorisation to expose the card.


We've also seen cards with on board HDMI port. So no more need for converters.



The recent 9600 series from Nvidia can be found in different flavours...
Here we see the 1 Gb DDR3 version.



... 512 Mb, but passive cooling ...



... And combining the better of two worlds, silent heatpipe cooling from Zalman and 2 (!!) Gb of DDR3 memory.