MSI X99S MPower Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 15.10.14Page:
Connectors and I/O
In total there are eight angled SATA ports on the MSI X99S MPower, which is enough for every gaming rig, overclocking setup or workstation. Apart from that there is one SATA-Express connectors located at the bottom edge of the board. All the SATA ports support 6Gbps bandwidth and they've been natively wired to the PCH. Apart from that, in order to enhance storage flexibility even further there is one M.2 slots located inbetween the second and the third PCIe x16 slot supporting x2 bandwidth.In the top right corner of this board you will also find a debug LED and at the bottom edge there is are power and reset buttons as well as the OC Genie buttons.
Last but not least we also want to have a quick look at the PCIe slots. With this motherboard you get four full-size PCIe Gen 3.0 slots as well as two PCIe x1 slots. Taking a closer look reveals that the first two full-size PCIe slots are wired with 16 lanes and the third and the fourth slot support eight lanes each. With three cards, the fourth slot will be disabled.
Totally you'll find five fan headers on the MSI X99S MPower which is enough to provide an overclocking rig or a high-end gaming machine with fresh air. Once more practical is the fact, that those are all 4-pin connectors, which allow for fan speed control from within BIOS or Windows.
Looking at the external connectors at the back-panel MSI equipped the X99S MPower with eight USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports and one Gigabit ethernet port. Furthermore there is an analogue audio panel as well as a digital audio out and a clear CMOS button.
Having a closer look at the onboard audio reveals an EMI shielded Realtek ALC-1150 chip, which has also been cut off from the rest of the motherboard. Apart from that there high quality capacitors which should enrich the sound.
| Navigate through the articles | |
Gigabyte X99 SOC Force Review |
ASUS X99-A Review
 |
|
|