The Motherboard

Moving on to the board, you're not going to see anything too out of the ordinary with that standard black and blue color scheme going on. Of course, the most interesting feature of the board is the mATX format that's on offer which gives us that nice square motherboard.

Moving in closer to the board, we can see the expansion side of things. Unlike most companies who have chosen to include only 1 PCI-E x16 slot, you can see above that MSI have opted for two. Of course, they're not both x16; instead the first (top) one is x16 while the second is x4.

As for the other two slots, you can see across the bottom we've got an old legacy PCI slot and between our two x16 slots we have a single x1 PCI-E slot. Expansion slot wise, the board is pretty strong considering its small stature. Hopefully the rest of the board continues to surprise.

Moving to the bottom of the board, we've got our audio header and speaker header. The next bit that stands out is the USB 3.0 header and just above that you can see an onboard speaker. Moving across from the USB 3.0 header, you can see we've got two USB 2.0 headers and two separate front panel headers. At the end you can see our parallel header.

Turning the corner, there's not heaps to see except for the six white SATA ports. Of course, like our other A75 boards we've looked at these are all SATA III and they all run natively off the A75 chipset.