Since your humble reviewer is a motherboard lover we start off with these first. The MSI Gaming series received world wide numerous awards, while being initially seen as a ripoff from the ASUS ROG series, MSI managed to differentiate their own Gaming lineup subtantially; their Dragon themed boards have been a huge step forward, not only in hardware reliability and compatibility; the sales have nicely increased too.

Before we show you three of the four mockup Gaming boards based Intel's upcoming motherboard chipset (yes we all know it's called Z something)

Socket FM2+:

Yes due to popular demand MSI has introduced the A88X chipset in their Gaming series; a full blown G45 and a micro ATX gaming version should satisfy the thirst of them AMD boys out there.

Both the A88X-G45 Gaming and A88XM Gaming will feature:

• powered by AMD A88X Chipset
• Military Class 4 components
• OC Genie 4: Overclock in 1 sec technology
• Click Bios 4
• 8 x USB 3.0 and 8 x SATA6GB/s ports
• Killer Ethernet LAN port
• Sound Blaster Cinema and Audio Boost
• High Quality Japanese audio capacitors

We discussed our feelings about the Kaveri CPU and its price level with the representatives from MSI. Yet they assured us the demand from the AMD scene, whether or not these will add a discrete GPU, required the MSI team to add these two nice looking motherboards to the Lineup. The Gigabyte A88x Killer board has got some stiff competition here.

Last but not least even an AMD 970 chipset based Gaming board for AM3+ is in the making!