Product Showcase
When we place the motherboard in an angle we see the rather familiar socket LGA1151. It will support Coffee Lake procs, this is referred to as the 8th generation Core series processors. If you count along with me, the appears to feature an impressive 18 power phase design, which can help both with stability and overclocking.
Storage ports then -- MSI is equipping the board with six SATA3 ports. A fairly useless U2 connectors was also integrated. I have yet to stumble into one person who actually uses a U2 storage unit, I do not know what companies waste PCB real-estate space on it.
Here we see that a bit better. Just a proper six SATA3 6Gbps ports, three M.2 slots that have been tucked away close to upper PCI-Express slots. See that in the photo below.
There are three M.2 SSD slots available, one 8cm type type 2242/2260/2280 and two 10cm type 2260/2280/22110 slot. All support PCIe x4/x2 Gen 3.0. With NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 connectors on-board. Delivering up to 32 Gb/s data transfer speed per connector, the M.2 solution supports RAID modes. Considering the chipset runs out of PCIe lanes, the M.2 units are shared in-between U2 and SATA ports as well. The slots have a heat shield, the blue plastic you can see is a cover for thermal padding that has been applied on the inside of the M.2 shields.
As you can see, the memory DIMM slots have been reinforced with metal shielding as well. And as stated on the previous page it supports single and dual channel with support up-to DDR4 4,133 (O.C.) and starts at 2,133 MHz memory modules. 4 x DDR4 DIMM sockets can sport up-to 64 GB of system memory.
