The Motherboard

Moving onto the board, we can see that we've got the same look we've seen from MSI for a while now with the dark black PCB and the dark blue / silver setup going on with our expansion slots and heatsinks. It's one of the better looking color schemes on the market at the moment and it's nice to see it's implemented on the latest 990FXA-GD80.

Moving in closer, we can get a good look at what exactly is going on with the expansion side of things. We've got a single older legacy PCI slot along with two 1x PCIe slots. Finally, we've got four PCIe x16 slots, although you can see the second and last slot are wired up for x8 speed only.

Moving to the bottom of the board, we can as usual see a fair bit going on. Starting from the left, we've got our audio header, 1394 firewire header, COM header and three buttons which allow auto overclocking via OC Genie along with a power and reset button. Next to that we've got two USB headers, our LED debug reader and our front panel headers.

Turning the corner, we've got a single USB 3.0 header on the far left that runs off the NEC D720200 chip along with six SATA III ports that all run off the AMD SB950 chipset natively.