MSI has unveiled a new lineup of X870 and X870E AMD motherboard options, which include an extra eight-pin PCIe power connector on the board, boosting the overall ability of the board to power your GPU, CPU, fans, and other components all at the same time. You’ll still need extra power connectors to plug directly into your GPU, but these new boards should in theory cope better with the extreme power requirements of top-tier systems.
While this new MSI feature certainly isn’t going to be an essential one for the best gaming motherboards, it’s one you might want to consider if you’re combining some of the most power-hungry components in one system and are considering overclocking them too.
The nitty gritty of this feature is actually a little confusing, so let’s break it down. For a start, this isn’t a cable-management system for a conventional eight-pin PCIe graphics card power cable, in the vein of the recent slew of motherboards that have their connectors flipped round and on the back of the board, even though it uses the same plug. Instead, it’s delivering power to the whole board.
It’s also not quite the same as the supplemental power connectors that have been featured on motherboards for some years now either, as those have been specifically required for certain CPUs, whereas this is a board-wide boost.
What the new connector does, then, is provide an extra 252W of peak power to the board as a whole, including the PCIe slot for your GPU. These eight-pin PCIe cables are normally rated to deliver 150W, but the new ATX 3.1 standard that these boards support allows for a 2.5x power excursion. That means the power delivery can safely boost beyond its normal rating for short periods of time.
MSI gives the example of partnering an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X with an MSI Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim X 24G, which can draw a lot of power when the two components are combined. If you also had a lot of fans and RGB lighting, this could see the motherboard’s power delivery put under strain.
Of course, there are already plenty of existing systems out there that combine 4090 GPUs with top-tier CPUs without the need for an extra connector, but, it certainly can’t hurt to have a little extra headroom.
The new feature will be coming to MSI’s AMD X870 and X870E motherboards, which are due to be released on September 26, and we suspect the prices for boards with the feature will be rather high.
That’s all the more reason why we recommend the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D as our top gaming CPU, as it not only delivers the best gaming performance but draws relatively little power too.