One of the first vPro motherboards we received is MSI's Q965MDO. It uses Intel's Q965 chipset, which resembles a G965 with added ATM/vPro capabilities. The board uses solid capacitors and a four-phase voltage regulator design, which is powerful enough to also run Core 2 Quad processors. It is cooled passively, which we believe is very important for office PCs as no one wants them to be noisy.

The Southbridge offers as many as six Serial ATA/300 ports, and there are four DIM memory sockets, which can be considered a healthy number for a MicroATX motherboard. There are many low-cost solutions that can only host two memory modules. This has to be seen as a clear disadvantage in case you should need to upgrade your memory.

There is a HD sound system, an Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller, a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), integrated graphics and sufficient USB 2.0 interfaces. For add-on cards this board carries two 32-bit PCI slots and an x1 PCI Express slot. If you want to install a powerful, discrete graphics card, there is an x16 PCIe slot.

MSI didn't provide much documentation on vPro, which is a clear indicator that the firm is willing to provide vPro-compatible hardware, but it leaves software, system assembly and configuration to system builders.