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A
Closer Look The board itself is built on the now trademark
red PCB and a cursory glance doesn't really reveal anything unusual aside from
a new design North Bridge cooler and a smal silver coloured block printed "MSI
CoreCell". Otherwise things look fairly standard with five PCI slots, one
AGP slot, an additional IDE connector. 
Four
SATA connectors and trhe additional IDE connector are positioned in the lower
left of the board as viewed above. As we mentioned in out look at the K7N2 Delta
MSI are now colour-coding their connectors, and in fact if you look you'll notice
that even the fron panel connector block is now colour-coded. A welcome step but
you'd think someone could just step and and create a standardised block that just
plugs straight in for every motherboard and saves us all the hassle of messing
around with these fiddly little connectors altogether! 
MSI
have stuck with the popular Promise
PDC20376 AATA controller chip.
The Promise PDC20378 offers dual Serial ATA-150 channels plus it also allows for
an additional ATA-133 IDE channel too. You are able to add two SATA devices as
single and separate drives are to create a RAID array of levels 0 or 1. I haven't
been able to test this but I understand that even under absolutely perfect conditions
the architecture of this particular Promise controller means it will never peak
beyond 133 MB/sec, not that we're likely to see that happen for a while anyway!
Moving to the front right of
the board are the three DIMM slots of course the two IDE and single floppy connectors.
These are good and high up the board which should help some full tower case users.
The ATX power connector is also here which is again something that should please
the fussier users. 
To
the left of the two yellow IDE connectors you can see a little silver block stamped
"MSI CoreCell". 
Speedster
technology: contains most flexible BIOS options for overclocking, including
async mode of FSB and memory frequency, 0.05V increment for memory voltage adjustment
and the minimal increment of 0.0125V for Vcore. BuzzFree
technology: examines current system utilization and temperature before leveraging
thermal requirement & fan speed -- dramatically cut up to 50% of system noise,
reduce the annoying buzz and improve the quality of audio and video application. PowerPro
technology: a power management solution, which helps to moderate power consumption
up to 67%, to assure motherboard stability and to enhance overclocking capability. LifePro
technology: prolongs motherboard, CPU and system fan life by monitoring their
operations, which eliminates the possible system crash. Well,
this may look like some big, new-fangled, high-tech controller chip but I've got
news for you.....it isn't! I couldn't tell if the block was made from plastic
or aluminium but what ever it's made of it's solid and simply sits above a chip
that features on many of MSI's motherboards. The chip that
resides below that block is the one shown below which is also on the K7N2 series
boards, and try though I did I wasn't able to dig up any information on its exact
functions. Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with a little creative
marketing, all the other board manufacturers do it. The only time it's a problem
in my book is when lies are involved, and in MSI's case they're not. It seems
most of the new "CoreCell" features are simply a result of better hardware
monitoring and specialised BIOS functions rather than being the domain of any
one chip in particular, though that little chip below the block may have taken
on some of them. Either way, it seems that the CoreCell features touted by MSI,
like thermally throttled fans and reduced power consuption are all justified so
it's a feature worth having even if it's powered by an elastic band and bits of
string. 
Over
to the top left of the board and there are only five PCI slots if that matters
to you, though the tradeoff as is often the case is that there's no need to unseat
your graphics card in order to add or remove memory. As you can see MSI have moved
the CMOS battery to behind the PCI slots which will make it a pain to change but
considering how often you're likely to need to do this I hardly think we should
get too upset about it. The big square chip in the top right hand corner is a
Broadcom 5788 chip which provides single-port 10MB/s, 100MB/s, 1000MB/s Base-T
operation. 
I
rather like the new design North Bridge cooler MSI have used. The cool blue semi-translucent
fan gives the illusion of great cooling whether that's the case or not and although
you'd bet good money that the thing will light when you power up the board I can
in fact tell you it doesn't. 
Once
more we see AMD's directives followed and with no mounting holes around the socket,
and on the subject of the socket things look a little tight on the clearance front. 
Those
two capacitors (arrowed in yellow above) could make life difficult for fitting
some larger heat sinks and I can tell you right off that the Cooler Master heat
pipe HSFs foul quite badly on the lower capacitor though you can get away with
it....just! The image below gives a slightly optimistic representation
of the socket clearance available though depending on the design of your cooler
you may find that inductance coil creeping in onthe top left is also in the way. 
And
power is catered for thanks to the now standard three phase design. There may
be arguments over the merits of three phase power circuits but if they're done
right they do reduce heat and smooth out the feed. It's interesting that MSI haven't
felt the need to add passive cooling this time around so the MOSFETS presumably
don't get as toasty as their nForce variants. 
The
rear I/O panel is dominated by six hardwired USB connectors 
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