The Motherboard Continued

Continuing to move around the motherboard we come up to the top half and on the far left next to our SATA ports you can see the V Check points which are used with the included cables to check voltages in certain areas on the board. Next to that we've got the main 24-pin ATX power connector and closer to the top we've got the power button.

Following the trend of added power connectors you can see in the top corner we've got two 8-pin CPU power connectors. For those who are using only one or two video cards, the extra 6-pin power connector won't be needed. Outside of extreme overclocking, you're not going to have a big need for the use of the second CPU connector.

Also here we get a better look at the Gatling gun heatsink that MSI have implemented. We haven't been sold on the whole gun theme that we saw GIGABYTE start to use a while ago and we continue to not be all that sold on it now. At least the fact it's black means it blends in with the board and it doesn't stand out like a sore thumb.

Moving back a bit we can again see the Gatling gun heatsink and really it doesn't look too bad amongst the black color scheme. We also get a look at some of the other heatsinks that are present, the eight DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 128GB of 2400MHz DDR RAM via overclocking and finally a look at the CPU socket which is pretty clean looking.

Finally we finish off with the I/O side of things and starting from the left we've got a combo PS2 port and two USB 2.0 ports. Moving along we've got a clear CMOS button along with a coaxial and optical audio out port running off the Realtek ALC892 HD codec.

Continuing to move over we've got four more USB 2.0 ports and a Firewire one running off the VIA VT6315N chip. The next batch of connectors includes four USB 3.0 ports running off the NEC D720200 chip and two Gigabit ports running of the Intel 82579V and 82574L controllers. Finally we finish up with six auxiliary connectors that run off the same Realtek HD codec.