Product Showcase

 
When we place the motherboard at an angle we see that all new socket LGA2066. It will support both Kaby and Skylake-X procs, these are referred to as the Core X series processors. The mounting retention is the same as on X99, meaning you can reuse your cooler and are not forced to purchase a new socket mounting system or complete cooling kit. Mind you, that Skylake-X runs HOT when fully stressed, get a proper cooler!

** Forgive me the quality of the photos. Right after this photo-shoot, I sent the trusty old Canon L lens to a repair shop as it is having focusing issues of some kind. 

Storage ports then -- MSI is equipping the board with eight SATA3 ports. There is also one metal shielded U2 connector. 
 

 
Here we see that a bit better. A proper eight SATA3 6Gbps ports, alongside three M.2 slots that have been tucked away between the PCI-Express slots. Where the blue protection wrap is showing, that's where the M.2 units are residing, nicely chilled under a proper heatsink.

 
There are three M.2 SSD slots available on-board, one 8cm type 2242/2260/2280 and two 10cm type 2260/2280/22110 slots. Both support PCIe x4/x2 Gen 3.0. With two NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 connectors onboard, MSI brings to the user PCI-Express connectivity for SSD devices. Delivering up to 32 Gb/s data transfer speed per connector, the dual M.2 supports RAID modes. The new M.2 shields have proper thermal padding and function both as protective covers and heatsinks. And again, you can add another four of them with the add-in card.
 

 
The memory DIMM slots have been reinforced with metal shielding as well. The board supports single, dual and quad channel with support up-to DDR4 4266+ (O.C.) and starts at 2133 MHz memory modules. 8 x DDR4 DIMM sockets can support up to 128 GB of system memory.