MSI had many motherboards on display at Computex 2014, though very few were new that week. There were a couple new ones, however, as part of the new Eco lineup of products the company hopes to introduce.
The motherboards are built to be eco-friendly variants of some existing motherboards, and come with the H81, B85, and H97 chipsets. They will be known as the H81M ECO, the B85M ECO, and the H97M ECO; all of them are Micro-ATX boards.
The boards will have more efficient hardware, which should reduce the overall power consumption. The savings don’t stop there though, as there is also a software side to eco scheme. MSI has made it very easy for administrators to switch off unnecessary components, such as the audio, certain USB ports, and more. This can be flashed to the UEFI as well.
In order to demonstrate how efficient the boards are, the company hooked one of them up to a watt meter; it consumed less power than an efficient light bulb when running idle. We would’ve preferred to see the consumption against a non-ECO variant of the same board, though we were impressed with the sub 15-watt power consumption.
No word on availability, although MSI did indicate that it might take a while. The company still has some manufacturing kinks to work out, such as the fact that soldering on white PCBs can turn them yellow.
