The Motherboard Continued

As we start to move away from the bottom of the motherboard and towards the top corner, this would have to be one of the busiest locations on the motherboard. Of course, we've got our four DDR3 DIMM slots that we're used to seeing. These support up to 32GB of RAM at speeds up to 2133MHz DDR via overclocking.

Below our DIMM slots we've got our main 24-Pin ATX power connecter, a small buzzer speaker, our OC Genie button which lets us overclock at the push of a button and next to that we've got the little headers that allow us to check the voltage of certain areas on the board via the little connectors included in the bundle.

Looking around the CPU area, you've got plenty of room as you'd expect. Heatsink wise, we've got the really nice heatsink / heatpipe setup that we saw on the full size board which also advertise the Military Class II and OC Genie II. The biggest surprise here would probably be the fact that MSI have opted for only a single 4-Pin CPU power connectors instead of the 8-Pin one we see on most boards these days. Hopefully it doesn't affect our overclock or performance of the board.

Before we get into the BIOS, let's just quickly look at the I/O side of things. Starting from the left, we've got a PS/2 combo port; below and next to that we've got four USB 2.0 ports along with a single 1394 FireWire port controlled via the VIA VT6315N chip. Moving along, we've got HDMI and an optical connection, two USB 3.0 ports controlled via the NEC D720200 chip, Gigabit networking from the Realtek 811E chip, DVI, VGA and six audio jacks running via the Realtek ALC892 codec.