We've already seen MSI's X99S Gaming 9 AC, and now the company has posted an image of its X99S XPower AC. The motherboard can only be seen from one angle, and to make things a little more difficult, MSI has made it look frosty.
Of course, we know what the frosty effect means: the motherboard is built for overclocking and liquid nitrogen. The features on the board cater to that, so we will probably find very strong VRM circuitry as well as multiple voltage readout terminals. All-in-all, this is what we expect from an XPower board from MSI.
In the image provided, we can find eight DDR4 memory slots for quad-channel memory as well as five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 expansion slots and one PCI-Express 1x slot. Storage is handled by two SATA-Express interfaces along with an additional six SATA3 (6 Gbps) ports. M.2 connectivity also appears to be present, which we can tell not by seeing the slot itself, but by the screw holes in their expected locations next to the PCI-Express 1x slot. We can also see two USB 3.0 headers for four front I/O USB 3.0 ports. The clearly visible dedicated audio hardware, as well as the allusion to Wireless AC in the product name, should also be mentioned.
Unfortunately, no image was provided of rear I/O this time around.
At this point, this is all we know. It will probably be a few weeks before we learn more, including info about pricing and availability. The Haswell-E processors are expected to debut sometime mid-September, and we expect to see motherboards officially announced simultaneously.
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