 Linus Tech Tips coverage of Computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital. Our trusted gaming gear partner is Corsair Vengeance, and our trusted retail partner is NCIX.com. Time for our look at MSI components. So right here, we've got something that, okay, it's a little bit different from what we saw before, in that it's completely different from what we saw before. The first time we saw OC certified from MSI was with their Z77M Power Board. And what OC certified meant was they were going to use enthusiast grade overclocking tools and stability testing tools such as Prime95 and do an actual burn-in on actually every single board before it ships, meaning at an overclocked setting, meaning that pretty much no matter what, unless something disastrous happens in transit, that motherboard will overclock regardless. Now that concept has been expanded incredibly since last generation. So now not only is there an M-Power motherboard, now we've got an M-Power Max as well as an X-Power motherboard that are both undergoing the same OC certified routine. So they have to run, they have to overclock, and they have to be able to survive at extremely high temperatures. Now that's been expanded to motherboards, video cards, and even partner products such as this Avexir RAM. So let's move over to our right here. You can have a look right here. Reference boards, what do they typically get tested at? Maybe a few hours of burn-in. MSI is testing for 24 hours on every single board. Now obviously overclocking is never guaranteed, but certainly if you use their easy tools such as OC Genie, which is you're going to find on the X-Power right here, which also has all the usual onboard switches in addition to some other cool onboard switches, you've got, wow, you've got 10 SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports, a couple USB 3 front panel ports, you've got DIP switches that looks like you can actually enable and disable separate PCI Express slots. You've got a ton of lighting effects, so these Xs on the VRM cooling solution up here actually are illuminated in addition to the MSI logo down here on the chipset cooler, the MSI logo here on the bottom of the board, and their audio boost solution which has a yellow line all the way down for the separate PCB. So audio boost is a concept that we're seeing on quite a few of the boards, including their OC certified boards as well as their gaming boards that allows them to drive up to 600 ohm headphones, and they're using much higher quality, more audio tuned components in order to deliver better performance. Now I've been an advocate of better onboard sound on motherboards for a long time. I haven't personally tried audio boost yet, but I'm extremely excited to give it a crack. We've also got some video cards, so there's their GTX 770 Lightning, which I haven't had a chance to check out yet, but if it's anything like their previous Lightning Edition cards, I'm expecting it to be pretty much awesome. Their 7970 Lightning is here, and they have a GTX 780 Lightning, which they are refusing to show to anybody. It is a completely new, completely different design, and there's not much for me to say about it other than the fact that I can't look at it, and neither can you. Okay, so that was overclocking optimized boards. Now we're going to have a look at some gaming optimized boards. What makes a motherboard gaming optimized? I mean, okay, we've seen color scheme. We've seen overclocking optimizations, which obviously help with gaming as well, because more performance is never, ever, ever a bad thing. But that's not really what it's all about. MSI actually launched, and this was a very strange product launch to me, their Z77 gaming series boards, very close to the end of the Z77 platform being the flagship platform. But I guess what they were trying to do is test it out and find out if this was a concept that really resonated. And they did a few things differently. So number one is they added Killer Nick E2200 networking, which allows you to have network prioritization that's built directly into your board. I mean, I was never a huge advocate of the Killer Nick, but the problem was that the thing cost over $100. I mean, it performed better than onboard Nick Solutions at the time, but it was unbelievably expensive for what you were getting. Well, now it's built into your motherboard. I mean, we're talking about a $10, $15 adder for a gaming edition board from MSI versus a regular board. So you get the Killer Nick, now you get it for $15. Okay, now that's a more compelling value add. You're also getting their new audio boost solution, which means that they're improving the onboard audio solution. I personally find that in addition to visuals, great audio is a huge part of the gaming experience and doesn't really get enough attention. We also see a whole bunch of other stuff that we've seen before from MSI. So they've got their OC Genie, one button overclocking, because quite frankly, the line between gamers and hardware enthusiasts is more pronounced than you'd think. Many people just want to focus on the game. They don't want to focus necessarily on, you know, tuning the base clock and increasing the multiplier. But if you do want to do that, we have an overclocking guide for the Haswell platform, just throwing that out there. But if you don't want to do that, you press a button, you overclock it, no big deal. They've also got their military class concept continuing with a fourth generation, and that has earned them some interesting recognition. So they won the Computex Taipei BC Golden Award for this particular motherboard. They were the only motherboard to win this award, and there's a couple of reasons why. So number one is the features. Number two is the quality that they are going for with this particular product. So I don't know if you're going to be able to see this that well, but it's the first motherboard that they've actually had. I don't remember how to pronounce that, but whatever. It's certified. It's a German certification where basically they figured this board, based on the quality of the components, is probably good for about a 25-year lifetime, which I can pretty much tell you with the pace that technology moves at, you're not going to want to be using it in 25 years. So your motherboard is going to last longer than you could possibly want it to. It's going to be like that car that like, it's got like 300,000 kilometers on it. You just, you don't want it to run anymore, but it just does. And I mean, that's good, right? So there you have it. We've also got some more components of the ecosystem. So in addition to the gaming-grade motherboards, they're doing gaming-themed video cards. So these kinds of cards, such as the GTX 780 Gaming, 770 Gaming, and 650 Ti Boost Gaming, are going to continue these concepts, such as military-class components, all that cool stuff, in addition to actually matching the boards, making so you can have a more color-coordinated build overall. Thank you for checking out our coverage of MSI's components here at the booth. Don't miss any of our Computex 2013 videos. And as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.