While most attention is now on Sandy Bridge-E with the mid November launch date closing in fast and Bulldozer having left a trail of despair, that doesn't stop Z68/LGA1155 remaining with a super firm hold of the market thanks to its characteristics in providing a brilliantly balanced, high performance platform for all types of users.

That said, it's worth mentioning that MSI has just outed another Z68 offering in m(icro)ATX form - the Z68MA-G43 (G3). The highlight of this particular offering is, as its model name denotes, the inclusion of PCI-Express Gen 3 via a couple PCI-E (3.0) x16 slots.

Apart from that, it gives much of what you'd expect from such a board - four DDR3 DIMM slots, a couple SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, four SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, a couple USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit ethernet, 7.1 channel audio and for video output there's D-Sub, DVI and HDMI on tap. MSI rounds the feature set out with its OC Genie II overclocking facility and of course, that lovely UEFI BIOS we've all quickly grown to love.

Unfortunately we don't yet know the price tag on the Z68MA-G43 (G3).