The Motherboard Continued

Moving towards the top of the board, you can see there's nothing out of the ordinary here with our main 24-Pin ATX power connector present. Above that you can see our four DIMM slots which support up to 32GB of DDR3.

As for the speeds supported, that depends on if you're going to be making use of a Phenom chip or a new FX one. Up to 2133MHz DDR is offered via overclocking.

Tucked up in the back corner we can see our normal 8-Pin CPU connector and around the CPU area you can see the heatsink setup that is present on the board. What's interesting is around the socket, MSI have opted for the older style full cage instead of the newer one which leaves the sides open. It's not a big deal, but it was interesting none the less.

Finishing up with the I/O side of things, you can see from the left we've got two PS/2 connectors and next to that we have a little button which is used to clear the CMOS. Next to that we have an Optical and Coaxial out along with two eSATA / USB 2.0 combo ports at the bottom running off the JMicron JMB362 controller, two USB 2.0 ports above that and a 1394 Firewire port running off the VIA VT6315N.

Moving along again, we've got a further two USB 2.0 ports along with a gigabit networking port above that running off the Realtek RTL8111E controller, along with two USB 3.0 ports running off the NEC D720200 chip and six audio jacks running off the Realtek ALC892 Codec.