Connectors and I/O

MSI equipped the Z97 XPower with ten SATA 6Gbps connectors. This means you get six native SATA-III ports from the PCH and four SATA-III from another chip which is in this case an ASM1061 from ASMedia.
With this motherboard you get five PCIe x16 Gen 3.0 and and two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and all of them have been coloured black. From top to bottom for the PCIe x16 slots, you get 16 lanes, 16 lanes, 8 lanes, 16 lanes and 8 lanes. This means you can do 4-Way SLI/CrossFire with a bit of help from the PLX8747 chip. If you take a closer look at the PCB you will notice four DIP PCIe switches witch are connected to the PLX and helps CPU to fully support x16 lanes on the second x16 PCIe slot, so we recommend that this PCIe slot be used with a single graphics card. The placement of the PCIe connectors has been well thought in case of the multi GPU scenario.
Something that is almost standard nowadays on premium motherboards are the practical onboard power- and reset-buttons as well as the debug LED. MSI added some extra stuff like a two physical BIOS' as well as a another switch to select which one you actually want to use. Furthermore there is an OC Genie button, voltage reading points and a Go-BIOS button. This last one is here to help you get into the BIOS on next boot after pressing it. The BIOS can be cleared by removing the battery or simply by pushing the CLR_CMOS button located in the back panel.



In total, you will find seven fan headers on the MSI Z97 XPower, which is enough to provide an overclocking rig or even a high-end gaming machine with plenty of fresh air. A closer look at the pictures below shows where they have been placed. All fan connectors are the PWM (4-pin) kind.



Looking at the external connectors placed directly at the I/O-panel, MSI equipped the new Z97 XPower motherboard with a P/S2 connector, eight USB 3.0 ports, one Gigabit Ethernet port, one HDMI connector, a DisplayPort, two USB 2.0 ports, a CLR_CMOS button as well as an optical out and the analogue audio panel.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 3 - Features	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 4 - Layout	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 19 - Bioshock: Infinite
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 21 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 9 - 3D Mark	Page 22 - Power Consumption
Page 10 - 3D Mark 11	Page 23 - Performance Rating
Page 11 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 24 - Price Comparison
Page 12 - PC Mark 7	Page 25 - Conclusion
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1