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Their board design is really growing on me. I'm in love with the Gaming 9 AC or ACK boards. I'm quite surprised how they managed to get these features in at a good cost too.

Got the A88X version of this board in my backup rig. It's rather cool I must say.

Great review HH...! One of the more practical, informative reviews of this motherboard/cpu combination it's been my pleasure to read...! I have at home an MSI 970a-G46, and I can find precious little to separate it from the 970 Gaming--save for the NIC and the on-board sound, of course. I've been using this combo for > 2 years with an FX-6300 clocked to ~4.4/5GHz on air, stock voltage--solid as the proverbial rock, actually. I'm really, really hoping that AMD can shoehorn Steamroller into AM3+ and that they'll deliver a new core-logic chipset to boot--although, as you say, the performance difference between PCIe2.x & 3.x is practically non-existent. I'd go ahead and pick up a 970 Gaming if I had some concrete compatibility info from AMD on Steamroller & AM3+.

Nice review and a really nice looking board, with damn good features for the price.. kudos to MSI. AMD really needs something new and quick though.. the general bulldozer/piledriver architecture has mostly been a failure in the performance market. Sure there is little difference between PCIe2/3 when talking about a single card.. once you move to multiples.. Performance drops off fast compared even to a Sandy Bridge processor and I can only assume it is because of the PCIe3.

Actually has almost nothing to do with PCIe3. It has to do with how much a particular game is cpu-limited versus a game that is more gpu-limited. The only time PCIex3 really makes a material difference over PCIex2 is in situations where the video ram is shared with the system ram and there is no discrete 3d card in the system with it's own pool of dedicated ram. That's the entire reason that discrete 3d cards have so much dedicated videoram today--2-4GBs per gpu: the 3d-card's own bus is 20x-30x *faster* than PCIex3, so these cards texture out of their own ram when you're gaming, and only use the PCIe bus to load in textures *before* the gpu needs to display them. The cards are so much faster than either PCIex2 or PCIex3 that it simply doesn't make any difference whether you are running on a x2 or x3 PCIe bus. Too, nVidia's drivers themselves have always leveraged the cpu in the system more than AMD's, even in single-gpu situations (that's been my observation.) Also, nVidia's cards still use physical bridges for SLI (AFAIK) whereas the R9x's from AMD actually use the PCIe bus instead of physical Crossfire bridges, as did earlier Crossfire products.

2 970s are scoring higher in benchmarks on an old sandy bridge with HALF the pci-e lanes (16 vs 32 for 990fx chipset) than 3 970s with an fx8350 clocked at/near 5ghz.. unacceptable. Ive been a LONG time AMD user.. but I'm jumping ship as soon as my tax return arrives next year or sooner if my wallet allows, which I doubt due to Christmas.

Again, it has nothing to do with PCIe lanes because the 970s texture directly from their own on-board ram, and their own local ram bus is, as I've said, many multiples of times faster than PCIex2 *or* 3x.

EDIT* Jumped ship last night when the on board sound went out AGAIN on my Sabertooth 990fx.

Sounds like you just had a defective motherboard, maybe. Anyway...good luck with your next board!...:D

only good thing about AMD is that they dont change socket designs as much as Intel. if AMD board dies. you can still buy a new replacement. when my intel board died last month, I was tempted to switch back over to AMD just because I had a AMD 1090T and I just needed an new board and its easier to find and buy. Even the MSI 970 board supports the cpu. excuse my rant. granted my intel system leave AMD in the dust.