Considering the flood of recent X99 motherboard reveals, it's rather refreshing to see some new Z97 gear. MSI posted a photo of its new black and white Z97 SLI Krait Edition motherboard, and the company says that a motherboard with a black and white design is in high demand. This one is built especially for case modders and system builders wanting a black and white theme, obviously, and it's named after the Krait snake that sports a similar color pattern. (Unrelated to this. Sorry if you got confused and/or excited there for a minute.)
Regarding specifications, this is an ATX motherboard with the LGA1150 socket and four DDR3 memory slots, along with two PCI-Express x16 slots. There are also three PCI-Express 1x slots and two old-school PCI slots. For storage connectivity, there is a single SATA-Express interface along with four SATA3 (6 Gbps) ports.
You can also see an M.2 slot with support for all lengths of M.2 SSDs. It doesn't look like the motherboard has any dedicated audio hardware, so you'll probably have to make do without the improved on-board audio we're seeing on most new motherboards. That said, the highlight of this board is the color theme, so those who truly want a better sound card will pop one into the top PCI-Express 1x slot.
So far, this is all we know. There is no product page up yet, nor is there any information on pricing or availability. We've reached out to MSI for comment.
Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
