MSI joins ASRock to be only the second manufacturer of a micro ATX X79 motherboard. The MSI X79MA-GD45 motherboard packs all the features of a good X79 motherboard. The LGA 2011 socket gets a 9 phase VRM design along with a 2 phase VRM to power the four DDR3 DIMM slots which support quad channel memory up to speeds of 2400MHz. Expansion slots include two each of PCI-Express 3.0 x16 and PCI-Express 2.0 x1. 2-way SLI and CrossFire are supported.
SATA connectivity includes two SATA 6 Gb/s (white), four SATA 3 Gb/s (black). There are no eSATA ports, but four USB 3.0, two on the rear panel, two by internal header. The rest of the connectivity line up is pretty standard: 8+2 channel HD audio driven by Realtek ALC892 CODEC with optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs, single gigabit Ethernet driven by Realtek 8111E, and a number of USB 2.0 ports. There will be MSI’s UEFI ClickBIOS technology and many features for overclockers such as voltage read points.
