MSI has today announced the latest and quite exciting addition to its range of motherboards. The new gaming series of motherboards from MSI covers Intel's LGA 1155 socket with three motherboards for Z77 and one for B75. This new series of motherboards from MSI will be available well into 2014 despite the release of Haswell being just around the corner, touted for June.
The motherboards have been designed with only one thing in mind, and as the name would suggest that is gaming. MSI have optimised input connections for reduced latency, introduced Sound Blaster audio for better sound in-game and added Killer E2200 networking for reduced gaming lag.
The new gaming series is available in four different motherboards. The best motherboard will be the Z77A-GD65 Gaming which has triple GPU support, followed by the Z77A-G45, then the Z77A-G43 and then the B75-G43. All these motherboards come with MSI Military Class III components and the OC Genie II although it should be noted that the B75 chipset doesn't allow for overclocking.
What surprises me though is that there is a B75 addition. This seems almost pointless seeing as the B75 chipset doesn't support CPU overclocking, is aimed at small to medium sized businesses and comes with the Intel Small Business Advantage software and firmware package. Maybe MSI should have opted for a mATX variant instead of a B75 variant.
If you want more specifications, details and images then please check the motherboard series product pages here.
What do you think of these new motherboards from MSI? Is the new design nice? Is the B75 model a good idea?
Hard Drives For Photoshop CS6
Fast Hard Drives has some specific benefits regrading your overall Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CC performance. When you are working with larger files with multiple layers this becomes more important. However if you are not working with more than 10 layers typically and do not generally have multiple images open at once, one fast hard drive is enough for Photoshop to do its job (especially in the latest 2 versions).
If you don’t believe that, you can watch my Photoshop CC tutorial videos on Youtube where with a single 5400 RPM harddrive (very SLOW) I am able to still do basic editing to images very quickly while running an HD quality screen recording app (Camtasia) at the same time, due to having 8GB of Ram.
Photoshop Scratch Disk: Ideally when Building a Photoshop Computer, you want to utilize the fastest possible Hard Drives you can but you should also consider using multiple Hard Drives. Photoshop recommends that you use a secondary Hard Drive as a “Scratch Disk”, Photoshop uses your hard drive as temporary “swap” space, or virtual memory, when your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation.
While you don’t need a Scatch Disk, it will in many cases help your overall Photoshop performance if you are doing Photo Manipulation or Advanced Photo Retouching or Compositing. If you are doing Photoshop work in the Print or Advertising Industry I recommend using a Scratch Disk and utilizing either an SSD Drive or Multiple SSD’s Drives set to RAID 0 for your Photoshop Scratch Disk
How does the hard disk store data?
On each of the platters there is a thin layer of magnetic film. Data storage on hard disks is very similar to that of a cassette tape. Data is stored in many 1's and 0's stored in different directions on the magnetic film by using a very fine oxide. These binary digits are arranged in different ways to represent different characters. When these are read back by the head the data is retrieved and processed. because no physical contact with the platters is made the disk can be re-written time and time again without damage to the disk or its platters.