MSI hits out at Gigabyte over PCIe Gen3 claims

Motherboard maker MSI has hit out at rival Gigabyte describing Gigabyte motherboards as offering ‘Fake’ Gen3 PCI-Express 3.0 support.

In a marketing brochure MSI took issue with Gigabyte’s claims of offering 40 PCIe Gen3 motherboards, claiming that Gigabyte’s boards didn’t offer Gen3 CPU select, voltage, switch chips and discreet components.

In particular MSI pointed out that the firm uses Pericom switch chips of part numbers 3414 and 3415 while Gigabyte uses Pericom 2415 switch chips, the company said. The difference, they claim, is that MSI boards offer 32GB/s of bandwidth compared with Gigabyte’s 16GB/s.

"Only MSI has True PCI Express Gen3" the brochure claimed.