MSI has announced the world’s first ATX 3.1-ready motherboards supporting up to 2.5x power excursion on the PCIe slot. You can fill your chassis to the brim without overthinking the power requirements.
Boosting the capabilities of its upcoming AM5 boards, MSI models now provide up to 420W to its various components – excluding the CPU, which runs on its own system. These X870 and X870E boards come equipped with an additional 8-pin connector, supplementing the power carried over the 24-pin. This allows more power to funnel into fans, RGB lights, and the PCIe slot.
Though MSI talks about PCIe 5.1, this doesn’t refer to slot generation and speed; rather, it indicates following the revised GPU power standard. After the original 12VHPWR issues, the new 12V-2×6 connector was developed with shorter sense pins to improve safety.
Combining the 24-pin’s 168W and the supplementary 8-pin’s 252W allows the board to feed up to 420W to its various parts. For example, the fans’ power headers get a whopping 132W, enough to power everything you throw at it. Another 36W can be dedicated to RGB lighting alone, leaving 66W for the PCIe slot. Note that the latter can draw up to 165W peak power, i.e. 2.5x power excursion.
MSI claims that its new boards remain stable even under the most demanding scenarios. In other words, you can pack a Ryzen 9950X processor plus a GeForce RTX 4090, not to forget a heap of RGB lights and enough fans to fill the largest of cases to the brim, without a worry.
The MSI X870 and X870E Series motherboards with supplemental PCIe power will be available on September 26. This is earlier than the launch date claimed by previous rumours, which talked about September 30. It’s possible the leak was simply wrong or that MSI will showcase its board on Sep 26 before a launch the following week. In any case, both dates are not far away, and we can’t wait to see what’s on the menu.