RD790 and QuadFire tip up

THE FIRST SHOTS of MSI's RD790 board have emerged, blinking, from the hardware testing labs of Taiwan - with all four X16 slots intact.

You can see the shots here.

The K9A2, for it is he, sports the latest and greatest DAAMIT mainboard chipset and is designed to be paired with the new Phenom processor. The board takes a leaf out of the Asus book by packing a chunky heatpipe affair to cool the northbridge and southbridge, as well as some extra heatsinks on the VRMs.

Most noticeable are the four PCI-Express x16 slots that dominate the lower half of the board. This may or may not enable quad or triple CrossFire, or even CrossFire and physics, if that programme is still breathing. Exactly what features the slots enable will be decided by DAAMIT closer to the release depending on what they can get working semi-reliably in the labs.

We are sure they'd love to tout a quad-GPU platform for Vista, especially since the green team has made such a hash of its own quad efforts - but we rather suspect that performance and reliability problems are going to prohibit that.

MSI's board also comes with six SATA sockets, as well as two for E-SATA. Look out for it in the next couple of weeks, as more and more of AMD's next-gen kit trickles out from the Far East, authorised or not as the case may be. µ