I have to admit I’m an absolute sucker for a good mini-ITX motherboard, and the MSI Z87I is one of the best I’ve come across. There’s something wonderful about pulling a tiny mobo from its packaging knowing that it’s capable of forming an immensely powerful gaming rig. There’s also something rather gratifying about jamming a massive graphics card into that PCIe slot and seeing it dwarfing the board it’s plugged in to.
If you've got three friends and the urge to break into the pro Conter-Strike: Global Offensive scene, MSI's Beat It! Open Qualifiers open for US teams this weekend. There are slots for 64 teams, the top two of which will advance to face the likes of Curse and Complexity in an eight team playoff. The winner of that playoff gets to go to Beijing to compete for $22,000 in prizes.
While we expect the next console generation to shrink the technical gap between PCs and their couchy counterparts, Valve's Steam Box initiative continues to pick up buzz. Its mission to make PC gaming living-room-friendly may represent a new market for motherboard and video card manufacturer MSI, who says it thinks Steam Box will change PC gaming as we know it. Speaking to Gaming Blend, Associate Marketing Manager Alex Chang states an expansion of the "PC landscape" could result.
Just 15 months after the technology first appeared in a commercial form, ASUS and MSI have finally announced the first PC motherboards that will ship with built in Thunderbolt ports.
Thunderbolt, if you're aware of it all, may sound like a tedious hard drive technology, but it's got an enormous amount of potential for PC gaming. With these two boards, we may finally be in the era of the modular PC – which doesn't have to be opened up for upgrades.
It means, potentially, external hard drives that are as quick as internal SSDs and plug in graphics cards that really work. Much as I like to tinker inside my PC's case, this is big.
Fancy getting £100 off a top end gaming laptop? MSI is today launching a cashback scheme offering to return up to one hundred of your finest pounds in a cashback scheme if you buy one of its four of its best performing notebooks. It's available to UK customers only and with the caveat that the laptop must be bought from a UK store.
We wouldn't normally report on this sort of promotion, except that it extends to the GX660R range which won the most recent laptop round up in PCG 228.
