MSI has been dripping plenty of teasers upon us regarding the Z87 XPower motherboard, but this time we have an actual picture of it. The folks over at ChinaDIY have managed to get one and unbox it for our viewing pleasure. The images tell us a few things that we didn't know before, but most of it could be guessed anyway.
The board has a very high-end design, as we've come to expect from all the teasers. It features a 32-phase VRM design and a big heap of overclocking goodies. In short, it's safe to say that this board is the mother of all Z87 overclocking motherboards.
Other features include five PCIe x16 3.0 expansion slots and two PCIe x1 3.0 slots. The motherboard thus supports Quad-Way SLI or CrossFireX, and it even comes with a PLX chip to add an additional 32 PCIe lanes. Storage is taken care of by a massive 10 SATA3 ports. The board also sports not one, but two USB 3.0 front headers, and it has an mSATA slot.
From the images, it appears that the motherboard will also have plentiful external connectivity. On the rear I/O it will feature two USB 2.0 ports, eight USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI ports, a DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel HD analog audio, an optical TOSLINK output, and lastly, a legacy PS/2 port for those who like to reap the low-latency benefits.
Best of all though, the motherboard has a lot of shiny lights, meaning that it will look properly awesome in a windowed enclosure, or even a test bench in a dark room.
