Final Thoughts

For the most part we already have a good idea of what the new Sandy Bridge-E platform is bringing to the table and in typical Intel fashion we'll no doubt be showing off boards in the coming weeks prior to the November launch.

Everything is beginning to line up with processors on the way, Quad Channel memory kits and of course more motherboards than we can poke a SB-E based processor at. In terms of what MSI are offering here, we've got a pretty nice spread. The typical MSI look is on offer and that's a pretty good look.

The inclusion of Click BIOS II is also nice, although expected. OC Genie II as always makes an appearance, but what has us really intrigued is the inclusion of the + and - buttons which are labeled as Direct OC. These kinds of buttons we've seen on video cards before, but not so much on motherboards. It will be interesting to see what this can do for us in terms of overclocking.

In typical pre NDA fashion, we couldn't go into a massive amount of detail when it comes to certain specifics. We have been able to cover a lot and no doubt what we're all waiting for is the performance of the board, chipset and new line of CPUs from Intel.

What's really refreshing, though, is just how early we're seeing the Intel products show up. Compared to AMD who kind of scramble to get us stuff the week before, or sometimes only days, we've still got a little bit 'till the launch, yet everything is beginning to fall in place nicely.

Keep an eye out for more motherboard previews as we build up to the launch of the new Sandy Bridge-E platform from Intel due in November.