Introduction

Wednesday this week our friends at MSI had a big launch event for a wide range of new products here in Taipei and TweakTown was on the guest list of invitees.

Not only did MSI launch a range of new Santa Rosa notebooks, but also on display were new motherboards and graphics cards. Due to the amount of products that were shown, the report from the event will be split up in two parts. The first will cover the motherboards and graphics cards and the next part will cover the notebooks and give an introduction to the new Centrino platform, previously known as Santa Rosa.

For everyone interested in MSI's upcoming P35 and G35/33 motherboards, we have quite a lot of information and plenty of pictures from the launch.

Motherboards

You might already have read our review of the MSI P35 Platinum, but if you have not, then we suggest you go and read it once you have finished reading this. Let us start with the low-end boards here, the three G33 boards that MSI was showing. The G33M, G33MDH and the G33 Neo are the product names and they are virtually identical. The difference being that the G33MDH is Viiv certified, and the G33 Neo is full ATX size, while the other two are mATX. We could not make out any differences between the two mATX boards other than the ICH9 southbridge.

All three boards support 1,333MHz bus speed and DDR2 memory. There is one x16 PCIe slot, one x1 PCIe slot (three for the G33 Neo) and two standard PCI slots for expansion. The mATX boards have four memory slots, six rear USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA ports, Gigabit Ethernet, two PS/2 ports, 7.1-channel audio outputs and a D-Sub. The G33 Neo has the same specifications, although it adds a parallel port, a serial port and FireWire, but loses out on two USB 2.0 ports and eSATA. There are a further five internal SATA ports (seven for the G33 Neo), one of which belongs to a separate controller that also adds an IDE port.

Moving on...