A Closer Look
Starting out with the backplate you get a whole bunch of connectivity. Eight USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports get you started. There is also a PS/2 connecto for those people who want to use one with a keyboard or mouse. For people that want to connect the motherboard to an audio reciever there is an optical-out and SPDIF connection as well. If you do not have a reciever, the board also provides you with 7.1 sound built in and of course you also get a 1gb LAN port.
Moving on, this board gets a nice 8 SATA ports.Four of which are SATA3 and the other four are SATA2.While this is not a huge amount it should be plenty for most people.
Sadly this board will not run 4-way Crossfire or SLI. You will be capped at 3-way. But there is plenty in the way of future potential connectivity with the amount of PCIe slots on this board. You just cannot run 4-Way video cards.
The socket area of the board could be a bit more clean but overall it is not too bad. It would also be nice if there was a little more space between the CPU socket and the ram slots. This can lead to issues for people with very large CPU air coolers and tall memory. But since there are eight memory slots you should have a bit more space by running in the farther away slots.
All of the power phases are above the CPU socket under a pretty cool looking heatsink. Throughout testing this heatsink ran nice and cool which is a testament to how efficient the power phases are that MSI uses.
Speaking of power phases, this board is equipped with “Military Class” components. They run very efficiently which is always a big plus. No issues at all were brought up through testing, even when the processor was running at over 5ghz.
BIOS
I have to say this bios is sort of like a rollercoaster. There are tons of good things about it, and some not so good things about it.
Visually speaking the bios looks nice. The clock at the top of the screen is quite handy. But I must say that the clock takes up a bit too much space. Moving around the bios takes some getting used to. I had a few instances where the bios would freeze if I moved the mouse around too much, but it would usually come back after a few seconds.
For overclockers there are a nice amount of settings, but it would be nice if they were sectioned off a bit better. Most of the settings are kind of lumped together. It would be nice if they were sectioned off instead, such as having CPU overclocking settings together on one page, memory settings, etc. But as-is you must look through a big page to find your correct settings.
Throughout testing I was kind of disapointed with memory performance. Various types of memories worked with this board but I was unable to achieve the same timings as I have on other motherboards. For basic users tightening up memory is not a big deal, but for benchmarkers those looser timings can cause real problems.
Another thing I would like implemented is the ability to manually input voltages and other settings with the keyboard. It is kind of a pain to have to look through a big list for a setting. If they added the ability to type in a addition to looking through the list it would be great.
Load-line calibration on this board is amazingly good. It was nice to set a voltage of 1.4v and read it with a multimeter as 1.400v. Not too many other boards will give you that accurate of a reading, big props to MSI on having such stable voltages.
Now, on to performance!
