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MSI has crammed plenty of features on to this AM3 microATX motherboard, including USB3 and a full complement of five SATA III ports. The BIOS supports the latest hexacore AMD Phenom II processors as well as providing a full complement of overclocking options, including the ability to save your own BIOS profiles.
There are two PCI-E x16 slots – they’ll both run at 8x if you have two cards in them, though. There’s also one PCI and one PCI-E x1 slot, although the latter will be blocked if you install a large graphics card. That means you’ll probably be limited to using the PCI or second PCI-E x16 slots for any extra expansion cards you want. Four memory slots can take up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM running at a maximum speed of 2133MHz.
The backplane also provides six USB ports, including two USB3 ports. A PS/2 port means that you won’t necessarily have to use of your precious USB ports for a keyboard or mouse. There’s also an eSATA port. Performance in our tests was good, with an Overall score of 120. If you’re after a fast, flexible and easy-to-overclock microATX motherboard of any AM3 processor, this is one of the best you’ll find.
