Here we have the first picture of MSI’s flagship LGA2066 motherboard, the X299 XPower Gaming AC. Looking at the board it has a black PCB with silver / white accents. You can see thermal armor covering the rear I/O, audio, and even a cool M.2 shield. There are RGB LEDs embedded in the rear I/O cover as well as on the PCH heatsink. These obviously will be able to be controlled by MSI’s Mystic Light software.
This board seems to be ATX, but TechPowerUp reports that it is somewhere between ATX and E-ATX. The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, 4-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, and an optional 4-pin Molex. There is a 14-phase VRM that conditions the CPU, which is wired to eight DDR4 DIMM slots (support for up to DDR4-4266+), and four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x16/NC/x16/NC or x16/NC/x8/x8 or x8/x8/x8/x8).
There are three 32 GB/s M.2 slots on the board itself. Two of them are 110 mm while the third is 80 mm. The top one features MSI’s M.2 SHIELD FROZR, which is a built-in M.2 thermal solution. The board will also come with a PCI-Express 3.0 x8 riser card which gives you an additional two 110 mm 32 GB/s slots. Other storage is made up of a single 32 GB/s U.2 port and ten SATA 6GB/s ports. The board has support for NVMe RAID and Optane.
For networking you have dual Intel i219-V Gigabit controllers as well as an Intel driven 802.11ac WLAN with Bluetooth 4.1. The board has MSI’s Audio Boost 4 with Nahamic 2.
