MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC

With a great architecture comes great responsibility

- Alan Dexter

IT’S FAIR TO SAY that the first generation of Ryzen motherboards had its problems at launch. While most of these have since been ironed out, a second-generation chipset brings with it a certain level of reassurance. You just know that those little nips and tucks will make for a better user experience. Indeed, this is exactly what we found when using this motherboard— everything simply worked first time. There’s more to this new MSI mobo than the fact it works, though.

It’s worth noting that there isn’t a lot that’s obviously new with the X470 chipset when compared to the older X370. In fact, looking down the spec sheet, there’s only one standout inclusion, and that’s support for AMD StoreMI storage acceleration— which is essentially a smart caching solution that combines the capacity of your hard drive with the performance of your SSD. As ever with such things, serious performance junkies will get more from a large, fast NVMe SSD, but it’s good to see that AMD is thinking outside of its traditional box.