MSI will be one of the first motherboard manufacturers to design one based on Intel's upcoming P55 chipset, supporting Intel's upcoming Core i5 series processors, using the LGA-1156 socket design. Boy, is this one interesting board. Pictured by Hardware-Aktuell, the MSI G9P55-DC picture shows perhaps the first picture of a fully-assembled LGA-1156 socket, with its complete retention mechanism in place.

The CPU is fuelled by two independent 6-phase power circuits. Four DDR3 DIMM slots support dual-channel memory. Storage comes in the form of six SATA II ports routed to the P55 chip, with four (blue) SATA II ports and an IDE connector courtesy of an additional controller. The board features two PCI slots, a PCI-E x1 slot to hold a "hardware" sound card (part of the package), an open-ended PCI-E x4 slot and three PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots. In case you're wondering how the 16 PCI-E lanes the CPU ends up sparing for graphics ends up into a 3-Way SLI supportive solution, take a look at what would trick you for a southbridge. That, infact is the NVIDIA BR-03 chip. It can provide two PCI-E x16 links, or PCI-E x16, x8, x8 connections to the three slots, much like in the nForce 780a SLI solutions for the AMD platform. Let the puny chipset heatsinks not fool you either. This board is pre-production and its release-grade version will feature an MSI-made cooling solution that cools the chipset and the rather crowded VRM area. We will learn more about this board as CeBIT progresses.


Source: Hardware-Aktuell