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The Board

The motherboard is black - and it means business. The copper heatpipes and attached heatsinks are moderate in size, implicitly assuming that the X58 chip, VRM's and Southbridge won't get too hot.

The new Socket 1366 mount looks tough with its four corner hold-down screws.

Solid state caps abound.

MSI was good enough to provide six DIMM slots - so you could easily put 12GB of memory into this monster. Do yourself a favor, and if you only have three sticks, use the black sockets - otherwise you will likely hang during post with a DDR error.

Ten SATA2 ports here... and an IDE connector.

A COMM port header! How quaint!

There is also a TPM module header -- a  waste of board space if you ask me.

I liked the power, reset and d-led buttons!

The overclocking dip switch did not work too well. Better to set the B clock in the BIOS.

Three GPU, two PCI and two PCIe 1x slots. Enough for almost anyone.

Another look at the slots!

The back panel is ugly, but highly functional. Eight USB 2.0, one FireWire, two PS/2, two eSATA, two Gigabit LAN, and Cmos-clear.

Here is the back of the board - note the heavy plate for the socket mount.

Here are the GreenPower Genie, Xtreme Audio, and D-LED2 for your viewing pleasure.

Lots of driver CD's and dead tree manuals.

Some information on the D-LED2 and what it can display:

And the rest of the stuff - GPU bridges, SATA cables, USB brackets etc.