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MSI releases 990FXA Gaming AM3+ motherboard with support for USB 3.1 and NVMe

By Koh Wanzi - on 8 May 2015, 6:13pm

MSI releases 990FXA Gaming AM3+ motherboard with support for USB 3.1 and NVMe

The MSI AMD 990FXA Gaming motherboard is the first AMD motherboard to support both USB 3.1 and the NVMe storage protocol. (Image Source: MSI)

Motherboards based on Intel’s chipsets have gotten a lot of love when it comes to NVMe support. Major motherboard manufacturers like ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI have all implemented NVMe support for Intel X99, Z97 and H97 motherboards via BIOS updates. Given that Intel recently announced the Intel 750 series NVMe SSDs, this support certainly comes at an opportune moment.

MSI has now announced the 990FXA Gaming motherboard based on AMD’s AM3+ socket, featuring support for USB 3.1 and the latest NVM Express (NVMe) storage protocol. We’ve not seen many AMD boards with support for both these new standards – this may just be the first – so this should definitely be music to the ears of AMD enthusiasts the world over.

As expected of a motherboard in AMD’s Gaming series, the MSI AMD 990FXA Gaming board sports enthusiast features like Killer E2200 LAN, QoS controls and Creative Sound Blaster Cinema 2 Audio technology. Like most gaming-oriented boards, the 990FXA Gaming’s audio circuit is EMI-shielded and isolated from the rest of the motherboard circuits to ensure smoother and cleaner power delivery to the audio components.

The board has gone the way of onboard support for USB 3.1, and the rear I/O panel sports two USB 3.1 Type-A ports for better backward compatibility with older devices. As there’s still a lack of standardization for the color of USB 3.1, MSI has opted to color these ports red to fit the theme of the board. In comparison, USB 3.1 ports on ASUS Intel boards are teal-colored.

The two USB 3.1 ports on the rear I/O are colored red. (Image Source: MSI)

The MSI AMD 990FXA Gaming will support NVMe right out of the box on 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, so AMD users looking to take advantage of the absolute latest and fastest in storage technology will now be able to do so.

And with three PCIe 2.0 x16 slots and an additional two PCIe 2.0 x1 and PCI slot, there’s plenty of room for multi-GPU and add-on card configurations. According to MSI’s product page, the board will support three-way AMD CrossFire and two-way NVIDIA SLI setups.

However, for a board that supports USB 3.1 and NVMe, we were surprised by the omission of support for M.2 SSDs. This makes it seem like a bit of a half-baked attempt to race to the forefront of new technologies. Then again, it’s not every day you see an AMD motherboard with NVMe support, so it’s still good to have more options on the market. After all, wider support from manufacturers is key to ushering NVMe and supported drives into the mainstream.

There's no information on price and availability at this point in time, but we'll update when we know more.

Source: MSI via Tom’s Hardware, TechPowerUp

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