MSI Z87I motherboard review - Product Showcase

Right, SATA ports -- MSI is equipping the board with a good four SATA ports. All of them come from the Intel PCH and that makes all of these ports SATA 3 and thus 6 GBps capable. To the left a USB 3.0 header.

Already integrated on the motherboard for you is a Bluetooth/WIFI/WIDI unit. This unit will offer you support of 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and even Intel WiDi (Wireless Display) and by using a WiDi receiver (not included) you can watch movies on your TV without the need for any cables. The WIDI standard has yet to become popular though and we can only consider it to be an early stage transporter module as seen in Star Trek. Beam it Scotty .. dammit Beam it man!

Here you can see the single PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot, working really well. Bare in mind though that on a 17x17CM based motherboard space is an issue. Larger heatpipe coolers can actually block that PCIe slot. But try to imagine the processor cooled with a nice all-in-one Liquid cooling kit from say Cooler Master, Corsair or NZXT, eh?

You will get two DIMM slots offer support for dual-channel DDR3 memory up to even 3000 MHz. You can install a maximum of 64GB in total. XML is fully supported, we'll show you this little critter running at 2400 MHz by just flicking a BIOS switch.

Mini ITX board, who doesn't love em. So overall, MSI really chucked this Form factior PCB totally full with features, and made sure it looks nice as well.