October 28, 2020 | 15:00
Companies: #msi
MSI has announced two new flagship AMD B550 motherboards - the MEG B550 Unify and MEG B550 Unify-X. Both boards focus on being high-end motherboards for overclockers and enthusiast gamers.
The motherboards clearly have a moody feel to them right from the start. They both sport a modest and pure black design with MSI stressing that this is "instead of fancy LED decorations." That's fighting talk amongst an industry so keen to have RGB lighting with everything but it certainly means these two B550 motherboards look more distinctive and less gaudy than most.
Onto where it counts and MSI also has some impressive figures to throw at potential buyers. For instance, it's highlighted how the MEG B550 Unify made it possible to overclock the AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT to a massive 6,155.35MHz leading to a world record. To deal with such high performance, the MEG B550 Unify series features a total of direct 14+2 digital power phases, 90 Amp power stage and MSI's Titanium Choke III, along with dual power connectors.
Similarly high-end talk is also offered when it comes to cooling. The motherboard series uses a 10-layer PCB design which MSI reckons has been optimised to ensure efficiently delivered power as well as a cool and stable system. It also has a Frozr heatsink design which is exclusive to the MEG series of motherboards, along with an onboard M.2 thermal solution that aims to keep your M.2 SSDs safe while preventing throttling and keeping them cool and fast. An extended heatsink design on top of the power delivery circuits also aims to provide the maximum surface of heat dissipation.
The aforementioned M.2 SSDs can be vast in number too with the motherboard series offering quadruple M.2 connectors. Three of which support Lightning Gen 4 solution which MSI believes is the fastest onboard storage on the market with up to 64Gb/s transfer speed.
The MEG B550 Unify also offers 4 DIMM slots but curiously, the MEG B550 Unify-X cuts that down to 2 DIMMs in an effort to offer "an even clearer memory signal to explore the boundaries of memory overclocking." MSI has already cited its in-house overclocker, Kovan Yang, who has managed to push DDR4 speeds to 6,5536MHz using the motherboard.
Throw in Wi-Fi 6 AX support and onboard 2.5G LAN and this is a fairly impressive pair of motherboards.
For now, no release date or price has been announced. Expect it to be pricey indeed.
October 14 2021 | 15:04
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