Shifting down to the bottom half of the motherboard, this is clearly dominated by a large array of heatsinks. There’s three individually removable NVMe heatsinks which interlock with the cooling arrangement around the FCH (southbridge). The heatsink that wraps around the CPU’s VRM cooling also makes it way down to the FCH, where the heat can be more effectively removed by active cooling provided the 50mm fan.
All three NVMe slots are capable of supporting PCI-E 3.0 and the newest 4.0 SSDs, as well as SATA-based M.2 drives.


Removing the heatsinks, we get a clearly look at the layout of the connections available. There’s three PCI-E x16 4.0 slots and two x1 4.0 slots.


Something that MSI like to implement on their most performance-focussed motherboards is an overclocking dial, where MSI find known good values for specific processors and allow you to turn the dial up to 11 for an automatically applied overclock. Some ‘Silicon Lottery’ might be required here but it’s still a cool feature to have. The reference to This Is Spinal Tap with the dial going to 11 is a nice touch, also.
Slightly further up the board, along the right edge is a seven-segment display for BIOS fault codes, should you ever run into any trouble.
Moving the other way, there’s power and reset buttons, a USB 3.2 Gen. 1 header and a USB 3.0 front header.


Last, but certainly not least, is the rear I/O. This section comes pre-applied for a better fit and to make installing the board just that little bit easier. We get the following:

BIOS Flash
Clear CMOS Button
Wi-Fi /Bluetooth Antenna Connectors
PS/2 GAMING Device Port
REALTEK 2.5G + Intel Gigabit LAN
HD Audio Connectors
Flash BIOS Button
2x USB 2.0 Ports
2x USB 3.2 Gen1 Ports
3x USB 3.2 Gen2 Ports Type A
1x USB 3.2 Gen2 Ports Type C