Already during Computex MSI has shown quite a few of their upcoming motherboards and since that time more and more information has emerged. When Intel will launch their new Skylake processors, MSI will for example have a new Z170A Gaming Pro in their portfolio, which features fully customizable RGB backlight.

A closer look at the motherboard shows that the entire right side is transparent. There are seven RGB SMD LEDs in the PCB , which can be controlled via MSIs motherboard software. If you want to you can choose any color you like. Especially modders and and gamers might like this features since, you can make the board blend in perfectly with all the other hardware you have in your system.

Apart form the RGB backlight the MSI Z170A Gaming Pro is a mid-range socket LGA 1151 motherboard. The color scheme has been kept in black and red, which have become the typical colors for gaming hardware these days. A quick look at the CPU VRM shows eight phases. There are four DIMM slots, two PCIe 3.0 x16, two PCIe 3.0 x1 and three legacy PCI slots. MSI has decided to not put any M.2 slots on this board. Instead they go for so called Turbo M.2 ports, which support NVMe SSDs and offer up to 64Gbps bandwidth. Apart from that there are six SATA 6Gbps Ports as well as a single SATA Express header. In the case of the audio solution we find MSIs Audio boost chip, which is most likely based on a Realtek ALC 1150 codec.

We're definitely curious to see all the motherboards MSI is going to come up with for the launch of Intel's Skylake processors. We already covered the Z170A KRAIT Gaming motherboard, which also appears to be a promising product with compelling design. Therefore we expect to see a few other interesting models from MicroStar International as well.




Source: MSI Facebook