MSI Z97S SLI Krait Edition Finally Available

It’s been a while since we were first teased by MSI with their amazing looking Z79S SLI Krait Edition motherboard. Some might have forgotten about it in all of the recent news and reviews surround the Intel X99 chipset and CPU’s, Nvidia GTX 980 and iPhone 6 launch, so it’s time to bring it back to the light.

It’s been the number one request from the modding community for a while; we want more and different colour schemes. Red and Black, while a great combo, has been done to much and by everyone. Other than this, there aren’t that many colour choices, with some blue, some orange, but no black’n’white up until now. MSI dare to be different.

Just a couple of hours ago, MSI announced via their Facebook page that the motherboard is finally available. I couldn’t find any shops that carry it yet, so I guess they mean it’s available for the distributors and retailers to order. Still, it’s getting very close and I can almost hear how every modder in the world is getting anxious and excited with the prospect of this motherboard. The fantasies and modding ideas are starting to run wild, and it has to be channelled into something productive very soon.

The PCB is beautiful on it’s own; a black finish everywhere in combination with the white PCI express and RAM slots. The white accents on the chipset and VRM coolers increases the depth of the otherwise simple layout.

The board isn’t shy on functions either. It supports the 4th and 5th Geneneration Intel Core Pentium and Celeron processors for the LGA 1150 socket. It has four memory slots that support up to DDR3-3300 (OC) on a dual channel setup. Further it has two PCI-E x16 Gen3 slots (16,0) (8,8) and three PCIe x1. For the legacy support it has two normal PCI slots as well. Of course this board supports both SLI and CrossFire for your fancy multi-GPU setups.

There is plenty of options for storage as well with six SATA3 ports that can run in RAID 0/1/5/10, one SATA Express and one M.2 port. It has a total of six USB 3.0 and six USB 2.0 ports as well as a Realtek 8111G Gigabit LAN and Realtec ALC892 7.1 surround-sound chip. The iGPU supports VGA, HDMI and DVI output with multi-monitor support and a maximum shared memory of 1760 MB. I doubt many people will use the iGPU on a board like this, but it’s still nice to have the option.

It uses the Military Class 4 components for increased lifespan and decreased power consumption and has circuit protection for CPU and USB devices. The OC Genie 4 helps with easy overclocking at the push of a button. It also has the Click BIOS 4, the latest in MSI’s UEFI BIOS.

Are you hooked on this board too? Then head over to our forums for a view of not one, but two amazing looking mods with this motherboard. The first is the MSI Krait Edition Case Mod by Jesse Palacio and the second is Kraitskin by CalegaR1. Both mods were posted by our good friend RawZ from MSI.

Thank you MSI for providing us with this information

Images courtesy of MSI