MSI are understandably shy about some of the chipset features of motherboards based on Intel's X99 platform for Haswell-E, but this reluctance apparently doesn't extend to anything non-standard which is part of their own SKU. Last week they took to social media to show off a new ingredient which they hope will encourage prospective users to choose their motherboards over the competition.

Dubbed the Streaming Engine and currently unique to the MSI X99S GAMING 9 AC, the new hardware is designed to unlock streaming 1080p video and gameplay content with a bitrate of up to 60Mbps. This is due to new AVERMedia encoding hardware attached by default via an add-in card, and will have a relatively low CPU overhead (especially compared to software-based encoding). AVERMedia are one of the biggest brands in the streaming business, so the new hardware should be supported through frequent driver updates and as an encoding option in most broadcasting software.

Both AMD and NVIDIA currently offer hardware encoding and streaming as part of their Radeon 7000/200-series and GeForce GTX 600/700-series respectively, but with a few restrictions. An approach which is agnostic towards both software and graphics hardware can provide a better experience overall.

There is still no official ETA on Intel's X99 platform or Haswell-E processors. However the increasing pace of updates indicate that it's quite soon.