The Motherboard Continued

Moving to the top of the board, we've got our four DIMM slots that we're used to seeing. We've got support for up to 32GB of DDR3 running at 1066MHz DDR to 2133MHz DDR. Below that we have our standard 24-Pin ATX power connector.

Below our main 24-Pin ATX power connector you can see we've got another piece that stands out here. This is the Voltage Checkpoint that we've seen on a couple of MSI boards. It's used to get accurate voltage readings on certain areas of the board like CPU or DIMM. It's probably something most people won't use. It's still present, though, and indeed a main feature of the board.

Moving around to the CPU area, we can see our 8-Pin CPU power connector and the very clean looking CPU socket area. As for the heatsink setup, we've got that same design we've seen before which has the Military Class II / OC Genie II branding on it. The heatsink quality seems good and it's proved to do a good job of helping us achieve a strong OC in the past.

Finally, we finish up with the I/O side of things and starting from the left, we've got a combo PS/2 port and optical out port that runs off the Realtek ALC892 codec. Next to that we've got a little black button which is used to clear the CMOS. Moving over again, we've got an eSATA port at the bottom running off the Marvell 88SE9128 controller, two USB 2.0 ports and a FireWire port running off the VIA VT6308P chipset.

Continuing to move across the board, we've got two Gigabit networking ports running off the Realtek 8111E controller, two USB 2.0 ports and two blue USB 3.0 ports which run off the NEC D720200 controller. Next to that, we've got a DVI-I and HDMI port for video out and six analogue audio ports running off that Realtek ALC892 codec again.