Moving on from the popular SLI Krait line of motherboards in a black and white livery, MSI has just announced the 970A SLI Krait Edition motherboard, which has two USB 3.1 Type-A ports and supports up to AMD FX-8000 series processors. Delivering performance up to 2 times faster (10 Gbps) than USB 3.0, the new offers two USB 3.1 ports, which are fully backwards compatible with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 devices.

The motherboard is aimed at the FX-8320E processors and typically 970 series motherboards are not engineered for the high-power (220W) FX-9000 series, which allows MSI to spend those saved costs on the ASMedia USB 3.1 controller.

The motherboard also supports multi-GPU and offers enough space for an optimal airflow when using multiple graphics cards -- an Nvidia SLI or AMD CrossFire gaming setup.

The rest of the specifications give two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots, two PCI, six SATA 6 Gbps that are RAID 0/1/5/10 capable, an Ethernet port, an internal USB 3.0 header and support for DDR3 up to 2133 MHz. Audio is provided by a Realtek ALC887 codec.

MSI has not provided pricing or exact release dates yet.

Specifications

• Socket :AM3+
• CPU (Max Support): FX
• Baseclock/Hyper Transport : up to 4.8GT/s
• Chipset: AMD 970+SB950
• DDR3 Memory: DDR3 1066/1333/1600/1866/2000/2133*(*OC) MHz
• Memory Channel: Dual
• DIMM Slots: 4
• Max Memory (GB): 32
• PCI-Ex16: 2
• PCI-E Gen: Gen2 (16,0) (8,8)
• PCI-Ex1: 2
• PCI: 2
• SATAIII: 6
• RAID: 0/1/5/10
• TPM (header): 1
• LAN: 10/100/1000
• USB 3.1 ports (Rear): 2
• USB 3.0 ports (Front): 2
• USB 2.0 ports (Front): 6
• USB 2.0 ports (Rear): 6
• Audio ports (Rear): 6
• Form Factor: ATX
• SLI / CrossFire support: Yes