MSI packs some serious punch into micro ATX sized X79 motherboard

We've seen quite the frey of final revision X79 motherboards being readied up to coincide with the big Sandy Bridge-E launch in just a little over a week from now, but MSI's X79MA-GD45 has just been exposed and should peak interest for many particularly due to one bold attribute - it is built around the Micro ATX form factor.

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I bet you're already thinking of how cool it would be to have so much power hiding inside a nice compact mATX chassis for your gaming pleasure. The board doesn't disappoint in the features dept. either and should be quite the solid board with the use of MSI's Military Class III components all round.

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Taking a good look at the pictures, we can see there are four DDR3 slots and a couple PCI-E x16 slots for SLI or CrossfireX goodness. The board has two SATA 6.0 Gbps ports and four more SATA 3.0 Gbps ports along with a couple USB 3.0 ports on the rear I/O and two more via headers. A Clear CMOS button is conveniently provided on the rear I/O along with 7.1 channel audio (including both S/PDIF coaxial and optical outputs) and Gigabit ethernet.