MSI can be a weirdly polarizing brand. By any reasonable measure the company
makes quality products, but for whatever reason MSI tends to be a love-'em-or-hate-'em brand. If you're a die-hard member of the Dragon Army, you might've been wondering where MSI's
new Radeon cards are. Well, the answer is that they don't exist. Yet.
When AMD released its Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards on December 13th, MSI was notably absent from the
list of vendors offering boards based on the Navi 31 GPU. We saw pictures of
Gigabyte,
ASRock, and
Powercolor cards prior to launch, and we
reviewed an XFX card. (It's pretty good.) So what's up with MSI?
Some folks started a nasty rumor that MSI was skipping on the SKU because of their absence at launch. That's despite the fact that MSI subtweeted AMD's launch day announcement with a simple "Available soon!" message. The rumors got to such a density that one mister Andreas Schilling went right to the source and asked MSI what the deal was.
As it turns out—at least according to Andreas—MSI has elected to take a pass on "Made by AMD" designs and skip directly to its own custom cards. Most or all of the designs that are out right now are based on AMD's reference PCBs, and that even includes some cards that come with three 8-pin power connectors.
According to Mr. Schilling, MSI's Navi 31-based GPUs will make their debut in the first quarter of next year. Given MSI's "available soon" statement, we wouldn't be surprised if the company shows them off at CES. We're eager to see what Navi 31 can do on a fully custom PCB, so we'll see about getting one of MSI's cards on the bench.