MSI does budget 1,333MHz board

MSI has announced that it has an Intel 954GC based motherboard that works at 1,333MHz bus speed. It means that you can build a budget system with a fast CPU, although quite why you'd want this, I don't know. The board itself isn't that remarkable, but it has pretty decent specifications for the money.

Beyond the support for the new Core 2 Duo E6x50 CPUs, the 945GCM5 V2 as the board is called also offers a x16 PCI Express slot, one x1 PCI Express slot and two PCI slots, as this is a mATX board. It only has two memory slots, but it support dual channel DDR2-667 memory. As this is a G chipset, it does of course feature integrated graphics.



The board also features Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel audio and four USB 2.0 ports. The press release talks about eSATA, but the MSI website makes no mention of this. The board features four SATA and one IDE connector.

But with a retail price starting around AU$84, this is a bargain product for anyone looking at building a system based on something like the new Core 2 Duo E6550, although this CPU is AU$220 or more. Still, it's good to see that the motherboard manufacturers are working on ways to bring low cost solutions for the latest CPUs, since with current CPU pricing, there will be a lot of people looking at upgrading their systems.