We’ve just witnessed the announcement of the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, AMD’s latest Radeon GPUs. You may have noticed that the naming convention is different, and we’ve skipped over the RX 8000 series completely – don’t worry, that has been explained. One thing that hasn’t been explained, though, is the omission of one previous board partner, MSI.
This is a brand that you may have expected to be heavily involved in the release of next-generation cards, but it’s looking like it may stick to Nvidia’s 50 series for now. Nvidia’s CES 2025 keynote will be taking place later today (at the time of writing).
MSI is not listed as a board partner for RX 9070 XT and RX 9070
As revealed by AMD in its CES 2025 presentation, pictured below, the Radeon RX 9070 XT looks to be the flagship card of this generation, with the RX 9070 just below it. For reference, the list of official board partners is as follows:
- Acer
- ASUS
- Sapphire
- XFX
- ASRock
- PowerColor (who showed off some designs prior to CES)
- Vastarmor
- Yeston
Although these have now been officially introduced, we still don’t know a whole lot about them as a list of specifications has yet to be disclosed, but they are rumored to target 1440p performance as AMD shies away from the high-end this gen. Even still, we know they are coming in Q1 2025, so we should learn a lot more about them very soon.
Jogging our memory back to earlier in 2024, we remember that MSI explicitly stated that its “focus at the moment is actually more on RTX cards” so this development doesn’t come as a massive surprise. This discussion the revelation that MSI seemed to be discontinuing its RX 7000 series cards, leading to rumors that it might stop releasing new AMD Radeon GPUs.
We speculated that the brand could be dropped as a board partner, and that seems to be the case – at least for now. The fact its new MSI Claw sticks to Intel hardware instead of opting for AMD demonstrates another lack of partnership.
