Product Showcase
Right, well left actually ... storage connectivity then. SATA ports -- MSI is equipping the board with no less then 10 SATA ports. Six of them come from the Intel PCH and four of them are provided by ASMedia 1061 controllers (which are pretty good ones). All ports are SATA 3 thus 6 GBps so you can manage some seriously nasty SM stuff with SSD and HDDs alright. SM as in master and slave as in RAID 0/1 .. see how I turned that into a pun right there, yeah baby.
In-between the PCIe slots and close to the PCH you'll however spot a cute small connector, this in fact is a mSATA port. Mind you that if you use it you will lose the SATA5 port as the motherboard can only handle ten storage units as maximum.
Here you can see the five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots; two PCI-Express x1 slots as previously discussed. Just drop them graphics cards in there at weird sexy combo's the lowest it'll drop to is at a x8 gen3 lane configuration, meaning you still have waaahaaay too much bus bandwith for current generation graphics cards. Here we can also get a better look at the heatsinks the board uses. Very subtle, very nice and working really good.
What I haven't mentioned just yet is that the XPower makes use of an XL-ATX form factor, that menas its slightly bigger then your usual ATX size, the motherboard is sized 34.5 x 26.4 CM (13.6 x 10.4 inches). Make sure it matches your chassis space.
But lets zoom in to the far left. The FASTB1 button is as simple as it is genius, you know that when you have to hit the F2 or Delete key forever to enter the BIOS ? Well, just press this button and boom, after a reset or power-on you'll go into the BIOS. Yeah, BOOM ... BIOS. That's what they shoul'd have named that switch :)
A two-digit Debug LED is present as well. It shows the exact system status while booting (for easy troubleshooting) and should display the CPU temperature when running in the OS. On page 1-41 of the manual you'll find an overview of the status codes.
Oh and hello there ! MSI is going all Rhinanna on my booty. Powered on it'll shine bright like a diamond! You can find LEDs underneath the motherboard. So once you have it installed in your PC, there's this HALO of light emanating from the motherboard. Very nice. On the top side the once powered on an MSI logo lights up as there is a LED behind it, as well as an X on the left side of the heat sink and the separate audio circuitry lights up as well.
