Gallery - the MSI P55-GD80 motherboard

Also, it's good to see that the entire motherboard will be cooled passively. MSI applies their SuperPipe cooling that we know from the GD65, but this time it has a larger heatsink that has to cover the 8+2-phase VRM. MSI uses a really thick 8mm heatpipe for the best cooling efficiency.

Check it out, two x1 PCIe slots, three physical x16 PCIe graphics slots (rev 2.0), however only 16 PCie lanes are available. This GD80 is SLI (2-way / 3-way) compatible just like X58 yet it will be divided into 8x/8x/4x. To top it off, two PCI slots.

Crossfire obviously will work with three cards as well, no questions asked there. On the motherboard we'll also spot chips from VIA VT6315N, a FireWire/IEEE 1394a controller that runs on the PCI-Express bus and we spot the Realtek RTL8111DL for Gigabit LAN and a Realtek ALC 889a 8-channel HD controller.

Look a bit closer, just above the analog audio headers and just above the white fan header you'll spot the second diagnostic LED. That actually is an APS (Active Phase Switching) display. It shows the number of power phases that are active.

Right one last photo of the motherboard with a Core i7 870 installed and a nice phat Thermalright cooler sitting on top of it.